December 2004 - Page 4 of 5

Apologies

General, meta

My apologies to my regular readers. Haven’t posted here in a while. Right now I’m in the process of working through my notes and gathering my resources for a novel based on a recent trip to Las Vegas… some of that may end up posted here, or maybe not. It will definitely make an interesting story…

In the meantime, if you’re hungry for stuff I’ve written and don’t mind some political thoughts, take a look at an editorial I wrote for Geeks Against Bush, examining the Rumsfeld Doctrine of politico-military deployment.

Other things I’ve been thinking about lately is atheism vs. “Intelligent Design” and other pseudo-scientific (lack of) thinking.

Yeah, I’ve been cranky. ‘Tis the season.

Update 26 January 2022: Found my old essay on the Wayback Machine and updated the link to point there. Am going to save the text as a page on my blog, also.

Turning ignorance into introduction

Dating

I was at the gym last night, in the middle of an “easy run” (no faster than a 10:00 pace), on the treadmill.. and I saw this woman get on the StairMaster or whatever, very cute… and she’s wearing a Boston Red Sox shirt to work out in.

And my first thought was, “I’ll bet she bought that after Boston won the Series this year. I should go over to her and ask her if she’s a fair-weather fan.” It sounded good in my head, it sounded cocky, and I could make it funny. It was a starting point, at any rate. The few times I’ve tried to talk to women working out I get a lukewarm response — Like the time I hissed at a woman on the next elliptical trainer over, “Stop staring at me!” She said, “Oh” and then got off the machine and left. I must have embarrassed her.

Back to last night, Boston Red Sox. By the time I finished running, though, I couldn’t find her. She must have finished and left. Bummer.

And, you know, I like baseball but I’m not a complete nut about it. I remembered the name of the player on the woman’s shirt, and decided to Google him. Funny… it was Nomar Garciaparra, shortstop, who was traded from Boston to the Cubs this year… the year the Sox broke their curse.

From one cursed team to another… now that’s irony.

So, if I had talked to that woman last night, and asked her that question, it would have turned out to be a really funny conversation. Because I’d be all cocky and knowing, but (assuming from the fact that she owned a Boston shirt from before the Sox broke their curse, that she was, in fact, a true fan) she could have lectured me about Boston and loyalty and schooled me in baseball knowledge and gotten all indignant… and I could have, oh I don’t know, offerred dinner to make up for the insult or something.

Dammit, things always turn out better in my head.

Brush with greatness

General

I got a “Contact Me” message last night and it wasn’t one of the 3 or 4 regular readers. Email is always good!

Turns out the guy was trying to track down the live version of “Cinnamon” by the Long Winters (OK, just John Roderick), as heard on KEXP last week, and my site helped him pinpoint where to look in the streaming archives. It’s always good to hear from people who share my good taste in music. Behold the power of Google, or something.

Then I noticed it was Jerry “Tycho” Holkins from over at Penny Arcade! Coolio! An honest-to-internets webcomic superstar! Probably too much to think that he’ll be a regular reader of my rants and posts, but, still.

So the weepy, previous association I had made with the Long Winters can now be replaced with a new, decidedly non-weepy association. Which means I still get to listen to them. Yay, me!

Tycho and his partner, Mike “Gabe” Krahulik also do good work under the Child’s Play banner. Feel free to donate to help out the kids.

Gift of the del Mar

General

Quick post on lunch break (I love free wireless internets!)

Went to Taco del Mar and I didn’t want a lot of food. Was going to get a fish taco and a drink. But it’s Double-Punch Monday (two punches on your customer-appreciation card) if you order a burrito) so I decided I’d get a fish burrito. But only an Almost Jumbo (half the toppings of their regular sized ones, on a smaller tortilla).

When I got up to the counter, though, they were temporarily out of fish sticks. I had to wait about 4 minutes for them to bake.

So when I finally ordered, they upgraded me to a full-sized burrito “for waiting”. Um, yay? I felt pressured into eating the whole thing.

But it was soooooooooooooooooo gooooooooooooooooooood!

Musical lack

exercise

Ran at the gym again today. I’ve been unable to run at a 9:30 or better pace for more than 2 miles lately, so my goal today was to do 3 miles on the treadmill no matter what. I did, in fact, finish my 3 miles (plus another mile on the elliptical but I never count that; that’s just warmup), but at a 9:46 pace or thereabouts. Argh. I want to be faster, dammit.

I could, I suppose, blame it on the lack of music. I brought my iPod (since music (and women in tight clothing) is pretty much the main benefit of running in the gym) but managed to forget my ear buds. Hard to listen to music without some kind of electrical-impulse-to-sound-wave converter.

My goal for next week is to duplicate my best official 5K time on the treadmill. I know I can, I know I can, I know I can…

Camera issues

Smacky

I took a few pictures of Smacky yesterday (as you can see from the updated Picture of the Week to the right). I just put them in the Smacky folder under my Picture Gallery.

My camera doesn’t do very well lately; has trouble focusing. Add to that the fact that Smacky is still a high-energy kitten and rarely sits still for long and most of the pictures I took were fuzzy. And the first few I took of him at the window clearly showed the trashcans outside my apartment. Yech. So I overexposed the next couple of shots and they turned out pretty good. I didn’t even have to use Photoshop.

Closer (2004)

reviews

Long Winters in studio

reviews

I’ve mentioned KEXP, a Seattle-area listener-supported radio station that plays great local and indie-pop (and lots of other stuff) music. I listen as much as I can. You’d think that wouldn’t be a lot, since I live in Portland, OR, hundreds of miles south of Seattle, but thanks to the internets, I not only get rumors but I get streaming feeds from KEXP.

John in the morning yesterday had John Roderick as an in-studio guest, (shortly after 9:36 AM, according to their web-based archived playlist. Roderick is the main member of The Long Winters, a band who, I think, should get far more airplay than they do. Roderick’s lyrics and arrangements are catchy, sweet, and very much like indie-pop versions of traditional Irish folk songs.

Roderick traded quips with the DJ, and sang three songs; “Ultimatum”, a brand-new song that is supposed to appear on the Long Winter’s upcoming third album, “Cinnamon”, a great sing-along song from their second album “When I Pretend To Fall”, and “Fire Island”, a brand-new song that apparently isn’t going to appear anywhere but here, or possibly in live performance (if Roderick can find and train a band that will stick with him long enough to tour).

I have fond memories of Long Winters concerts… so I was transfixed Friday morning, resisting the urge to call up friends (and ex-friends) and tell them to tune in. It was… brutalful.

Dr. Peter Davidson, Multnomah County’s highest-paid employee

Politics

More local political news — my employer, Multnomah County, is still having problems. Intimidating managers seem to be the norm. Dr. Peter Davidson, the county’s highest-paid employee ($157,000 annually) was trying to keep his racial slurs out of the press. Unsucessfully. The Oregonian first reported last Thursday that an unnamed county employee was reporting that Dr. Davidson had been pressuring her to keep quiet.

The employee used the “I” word — intimdation.

She was named in a survey that the county performed earlier this year, where she claimed that Dr. Davidson referred to African-Americas as “mud people.” The report linked above showed that the good doctor was put on administrative leave when the employee made the complaint about intimidation, which seems like a good move — put him on leave, then launch an investigation.

But… why wasn’t that done back in 2002, when the first reports of his racial slurs were made? Instead, Chair Linn merely shuffled the org chart, and kept Davidson on as an employee of the county. A tactic, I can report as a county employee, that was also used regularly when complaints surfaced about other managers.

Which is apparently what they’re going to do about Jann Brown. Even though, technically speaking, Jann Brown doesn’t have any staff under her… she sent out a meeting request for a “staff meeting”. She’s even bringing in breakfast! Joy. Rather than substantially address the hostile environment that Ms. Brown created, county management is going to pretend nothing happened. They’ll spend taxpayer money to send these awful managers to “sensitivity training”, but meanwhile the staff that has to work with her sees that favoritism and intimidation and suppression of complaints results in promotions and continued employment. Which further sends the message to other managers that, hey, these kinds of poor management are A-OK, too, perpetuating the culture of fear at the county.

The six-figure award that a jury gave to Lea Lakeside-Scott in an amazingly-fast decision (the jury in that case deliberated for only 2 1/2 hours, which normally signals that the defense has won the case but should be seen by county management as a strong rebuke, above and beyond the punitive damages) is only seen by the higher-ups as the cost of doing business. They want to push to reduce the award, then pay Ms. Lakeside-Scott off and make it go away.

I don’t think this issue is going away, however.

As Mary Botkin, a representative for AFSCME (the union that many state and county employees belong to) said in another local case of racial discrimination (this one at the Oregon Department of Agriculture), “We wouldn’t tolerate this at Nike. Why do we tolerate it in state government?”

Update 26 January 2022: I can not find any current links to replace the ones originally in this post, sorry. Linkrot is real, y’all. – Brian M.

Sluggy Backstory

reviews

Second, one of the webcomics I follow is Sluggy Freelance, which has been running for years. I’ve been reading it for 5 years, and there’s a whole lot of backstory, so it’s taken on a depth just from sheer history that not a lot of comics have.

At any rate, the current story would take paragraphs and paragraphs to explain, but the main character, Torg, is just a regular guy but right now he’s on this quest or something. He’s spent the last several months in an alternate universe that was taken over by demons from the Dimension of Pain, and in that universe Torg met the alternate version of Zoe. In his regular universe Zoe and Torg are friends, and have tried to date but it’s never worked out. Torg still has feelings for Zoe, though.

And, yes, you guessed it, because alternate-universe-Torg has gone missing, our Torg steps in for him, and Zoe and our-Torg fall in love.

Which is all just backstory (and recent backstory, too! I told you it was complicated (yes, it’s very much like a geek soap opera))… and it all leads up to two of the saddest moments in the history of the comic.

(Pete Abrams is the creator of the comic)Why, Pete? Why did you have to kill off alternate-Zoe? I was unbelievably saddened when she died. Maybe it’s just the stupid holiday season that’s got me so emotional (I friggin’ hate the holidays) but… dammit.

And then, in the past week, came the moment when our Torg rescues alternate-Torg from the Demon-King’s freezer (see, Torg is trying to get the Ziploc-baggie of Goodness stored in the fridge, and the Demon-King’s fridge has the freezer-side on the right, not on the left like Torg expected… oh, go read it, it’ll make more sense that way)

…and it hit me. Our Torg has his own Zoe to go back to (although any geek worth his caffeinated beverage knows the pain of having a relationship and then having to go back to “being friends” and that is precisely what our Torg will have to do, with the added pain from having our Zoe not know what went on between our Torg and alternate Zoe (I just can’t see Torg telling Zoe what his relationship with alternate Zoe was, but I’ve been wrong before (Why?! Why did you kill her, Abrams?!)

…but alternate Torg has lost his Zoe forever.

Dimension of Pain, indeed.