Author: lunarobverse

When I first saw the teaser trailer for “Cars”, I was worried. The whole idea, of people-like talking cars, just didn’t seem like a good idea for a movie. I was familiar with the teevee commercials with talking cars, and that seemed OK for a short 30 second spot, but a full-length movie?

But… it was Pixar, and they had an awesome track record. So of course I would give them a chance.

Because I didn’t see the movie right away, I saw reviews here and there, and sometimes the reviewer loved it, and sometimes the reviewer had reservations. More often than not, they didn’t like it. All that, of course, fueled my self-doubt… but, again, it’s Pixar. They haven’t made a bad movie. So even if “Cars” is bad, is it bad overall, or just bad for a Pixar film?

I needn’t have worried.

Several things combined to leave me with a good impression of “Cars”, and if anyone else is well-inclined to these things, too, they are likely to enjoy the movie.

First, the lead character, Lightning McQueen, is voiced by Owen Wilson, and his personality shines through. Other reviewers have dissed the main character as an “asshole”, and it’s true that Lightning is self-centered, but he’s also living inside a bubble of success that I found it easy to dismiss his more obnoxious traits on his lack of experience with the world outside of the closed world of racing. I bought into the character based on the vocal talents of Mr. Wilson and the context in which the character lived.

Second… duh. It’s about cars. There’s a sexy Porsche with the car-equivalent of a butt-hat tattoo (that only shows when her spoiler deploys). All kinds of motor vehicles get a character in the film, from tractors and combines, to fork-lifts, to street cars, pick-up trucks, semis… even trains, blimps, helicopters and jet planes. I don’t recall seeing a motorcycle, however – I’ll have to watch for that next time.

Third, the whole idea of the mythology of Route 66 is one that is as much a part of me as the color of my eyes or the language I speak. My dad met my mom while on a road trip – he was selling magazines for money, and she was a divorcée waitress in a diner. Or so they told me… Dad settled down once he met mom, but I swear the wanderlust has been passed down to me, because the scenes in “Cars” of just driving along the open road fill me with the longing to take the wheel and just go for a drive.

Next, and somewhat connected, the animators at Pixar apparently went on a road trip of their own; they give thanks to all the roadside attractions, businesses, and people they met along Route 66 during the credits. I heard somewhere (I’ll dig up a link later) that they collected vials of sand and dirt from along the way, in order to get the colors right. And the natural scenery of Carburetor County, with its buttes and mountains shaped like Cadillac fin, fenders and engine parts, is so well-done that it feels like an exceptionally clear dream.

As usual there are so many in-jokes I couldn’t possibly recount them all, and that adds to my enjoyment of the movie. One of the first movies I remember seeing was Steve McQueen in “Le Mans”, my dad dragging the family out to see it. I don’t remember much of it, but I do remember taking a poster home to hang on my wall, and the sounds and sights of high-powered engines revving stay with me 35 years later. So the obvious reference of naming the main character after Steve was inspired. It’s touches like that, that a kid might not get, but someone with more experience will, that adds layers to Pixar’s movies and set them above any other so-called “family fare”.

My guess is that other reviewers may not have had the same level of affection for the topics at hand and therefore may not have been drawn into the movie as I was. And I recognize that the movie has flaws – the previously-mentioned association with teevee commercials, and the plot’s strong resemblance to the Michael J. Fox flick “Doc Hollywood” both show that the folks at Pixar are either geniuses of homage or derivative. I don’t care. The parts of the movie I love overshadow the few parts that don’t quite match up.

“Cars” is highly recommended.

OK, one more small post before I go to bed and call today “done”.

Hmmm… I’m wondering how much backstory to give to this story. But I want this to be a short post. So post a question if you don’t get it.

Mac OS X has a system-wide spell check, that shows those little dotted red lines under misspelled words in any application where the user can, um, type. And mine has been mis-working lately. Specifically, it’s working in everything except Safari, my browser.

If this had been Windows, and I was an average user, I would have probably just had to reboot to get the spell check working again. But it’s not; it’s the beautiful, elegant, stable Mac OS X. And I’m not; I’m an almost-certified computer technician with over 11 years of professional experience in the field of Just Making The Damned Things Work, Already!

(Sorry… post getting longer… can’t help it… I’m a writer, not an editor.)

Anyway – the process that runs in the background that handles the spell check is called “AppleSpell”. I poked around on some of the internets to see if there was a simple way to restart it, but, sadly, it’s not quite that simple. However, I found that if I just use Activity Monitor to stop the process, and then re-enable the option in Safari to “Check spelling as you type” it did the trick!

And if that seems like a lot of effort to avoid a reboot, you just don’t understand that I haven’t rebooted my new sexy thing in over six days… and counting!

Yay for not having to reboot!

Overheard at Backspace:

“I am so Gothic I made myself cry” – Tall, goatee-d guy dressed in all black

Today I passed the first of two tests towards gaining the CompTIA A+ certification for computer technicians!

I scored 803 out of a possible max of 900. Only 515 was needed to pass the test. Maybe I over-studied?

Today’s test was for the Core Hardware test. The other one is the incorrectly-named “Core Operating System Technologies” test, which will cover a wide range of Microsoft operating systems, from DOS all the way to Windows XP, and completely ignoring the fact that companies like Red Hat and Apple are also members of CompTIA and support the many certifications offered by them. Meh. Whatever.

In any case, the OS test will likely be harder for me because of my dislike of Windows. Wish me luck!

One of my first favorite clubs was a place called The Tin Quill in Portland, OR. It’s no longer in existence, but it was a tiny hole-in-the–wall place that was basically a bar-slash-stage running along most of the length of the long and narrow room. The rest of the room was taken up by two pool tables and the bathrooms, basically.

It folded in ’94, I believe, when the owners of the building it was in sold it, along with the porno theater next door, to some new owners, who turned the TQ into a pizza place and the theater into a music venue: the Aladin Theater at SE Milwaukie Ave. and Powell Blvd.

My friends and I became regulars there, and it got to the point where we would have guaranteed spots at the bar-slash-stage, and if the bartender noticed us coming in, would have “our” drinks waiting for us by the time we sat down. Except for Rodney because he was always changing his drink. Dork. It was like “Cheers” if it was on HBO.

Reason I’m reminiscing like this is because it’s the one and only place I ever saw a bar fight. The place was kind of a dive and it attracted a definite blue-collar clientele and dancer.

But one night, a new guy came in, dressed up in a fancy satiny cowboy shirt and pressed trousers with piping, and he had his own pool cue, in a shiny black case with bright silver metal corners.

When Sara, the bartender, pointed out the guy, we all knew that trouble was brewing. It’s not like the pool tables were very fancy – they were afterthoughts, something to fill the space up between the end of the bar and the doorway. Mostly guys talked the dancers into playing in between their turns on the bar-slash-stage. Felts were torn, the balls were chipped, the cues were crooked. Nothing special.

But this guy was obviously playing for money. What a dork.

I just sat at the bar and drank and watched the naked chicks in front of me and flirted with Sara (tall blonde with legs that when all the way up; she danced sometimes, too, but was an awesome bartender) and joked with my buddies. But after only a short time, I heard a shout from the pool tables, and I heard the “thump” of the guy with his own pool cue hitting the wall, having been pushed up there by a drunk guy in a leather biker jacket. I heard the sound before I turned to look, and sure enough, guys were squaring off against the guy with his own cue and his hapless partner.

My friends turned to look, too, and in the time it took us to turn our heads, Sara had quite literally leaped over the bar, grabbed a pool cue off the wall, and started laying into guys telling them all to back the fuck off.

My friend Terry had jumped off his bar stool and moved to the back door, away from the fight. Rodney’s eyesight hadn’t ever been all that great (a degenerative condition left him with Swiss-cheese retinas) and was about to follow Sara into the fight without really knowing what was going on, and I was just trying to finish my beer before we scrammed out of there. If I’d had longer arms I would have grabbed a bottle or two from behind the stage but sadly I’m kinda short and the bar-slash-stage was kinda wide.

It was all over very quickly. Sheepishly the regulars stopped fighting when they saw Sara threatening them with a pool cue, and everyone allowed the guy to pick up his now-broken cue and case and leave without any further fuss.

I remember Sara giving me and my friends hell for not helping her out, but I was honest with her – it looked like she’d had it all under control.

Yesterday afternoon, walking back from the grocery store, my eye was caught by a flash of white and aluminum on the second story of a building.

Looking closer, I could make out the white bitten-apple shape so familiar to me. It was an iMac, as seen from behind, barely hidden by the angle of my view from the street and the curtains. It coyly displayed a few cables, running under the desk on which it was poised.

…damn that was sexy.

Apparently I’m going to live to be around 77.

Or so. Unless I don’t.

I apologize to any readers I have left. Updates around here (and here, but not so much here) have been sparse lately.

I’m taking a mental break, a step back, a re-alignment of my goals and where I want to be, but I still have plenty to talk about, and by extension, plenty to blog about. So begining this week, I should be posting much more than I have been, and (hopefully) about a wider variety of topics and styles.

In the next two months I plan on taking a look at my first (unpublished) novel and outlining and starting my second novel. I also plan on actually looking into getting the damned things published or getting feedback on what needs to happen before I can hold in my own two hands my novel (which would seem to rule out e-publishing, wouldn’t it?)

I have other plans, also, but those are the ones most related to this blog and potentially of interest to any of the readers I have left…

Thanks for your patience and feel free to comment over and over again about anything at all. I love comments!

This post is for Tracy. She likes Harvey Danger’s newest album, “Little by Little”, and one of her favorite songs is “Diminishing Returns”.

But, she’s worried that she’s missing out on the underlying message of the song.

I’ve seen “The Annotated King James Version”, which goes through and attempts to explain all the song lyrics from Harvey Danger’s first album. I thought I’d do the same for this song. Maybe that’ll help Tracy, and anyone else…

The king of the swinging moves is back in town
And everybody’s tiptoeing around him
Surround him, as he
Pounds a silver hammer¹
Drops a revolutionary grammar
Concerning the burning of city hall
And urban sprawl and decay

*Farewell to the day
Of having it both ways
Hell is other people²
Some people never learn
When optimism fails
And my cooler head prevails
I will meet you at the point of diminishing returns

Down in the abstract
Looking for a concrete artifact
Something to hold on to
Not one more thing to believe in
Stuck in a fallback
And fighting off a heart attack
And you’re so tangible
Like a nitroglycerin tablet
Under my tongue

Farewell to the day
Of having it both ways
The boom’s a bust-out
But thanks for your concern
When pessimism fails and
My coooler head prevails
I will meet you at the point of diminishing returns

Progress shall be defined
By your position on the bridge
As it burns
When populism, activism, urbanism fail
My cooler head, my cooler head will prevail
When there are no more gods left to annoit
No more noses to bend out of joint
I’m gonna meet you at the point of diminishing returns

¹ Reference to “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” by The Beatles.
² Famous mis-quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit”.

I love Portland.

I’m at Backspace, the coolest geek coffee-shop-slash-internet-cafe, hanging out with the other geeks.

I love Backspace and I love their music.

Just now, The Decemberist’s (local Portland band) “Legionnaire’s Lament” came on.

And everyone in the place started singing along. Or at least mouthing the word.

Yes, including me. I love that song. It’s on my “Happy” playlist.