Category: General

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?

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.

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):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwB5F7pgWkE&hl=en&fs=1]

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.

Maybe longer post and more (fuzzy iPhone) pictures later. Maybe.

But I just wanted to note that I saw Dave Grohl and company last night.

Arena rock isn’t my normal kind of thing, but I’ll make an exception for the Foo Fighters.

Much Foo ass was kicked. And many Foo names were taken.

Sorry I haven’t been posting much lately.

Didja notice that the Democratic-led Congress handed President Bush the gift of monarchy yesterday? When King Bush II signs H.R. 6304 into law today (probably cackling with glee over just how much the “opposition party” in Congress gave him), you can say goodbye to any protection from unreasonable search and seizure you may have thought was provided by the Bill of Rights.

Didja notice that? No?

I’m sorry; go back to your American Idol, and make sure to go to church on Sunday to pray to Invisible Sky Man. Didn’t mean to disturb your slumber.

What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeFlPxMTP24&hl=en]

Happy Independence Day from Portland, Oregon.

Reading Roger Ebert’s post titled “When a movie hurts too much”, I’m reminded that, at least since my mother’s initial run-in with cancer, through the nerve-wracking days when my niece was born and had to spend extra days in the hospital, to my mother’s second and final run-in with cancer, and brought to complete sad fruition when my sister’s father-in-law went to a hospital and never left two summers ago…

I can’t watch any movie scene set in a hospital room without at least tearing up.

The only exception is watching “Scrubs”, but that’s rarely about actual hospital stuff. But if they show a patient, in that distinctive bed, and the little monitor is beeping…. yeah. Tears.

These three songs came up on my iPhone this morning, and each one earned a second listen, even though they all evoked different feelings and memories in me.

First, Moby’s “At Least We Tried”:

Second, Bad Religion’s “Honest Goodbye”:

Finally, Bob Marley’s “Satisfy My Soul”:

I love random music because it’s a hotbed of apophenia.

On this day one-hundred and fifty-seven years ago (1 July 1850) Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin gave a joint reading of their papers to the Linnean Society in London, outlining their independently-reached theories of the process of natural selection. Natural selection was the first plausible mechanism that explained the alreadyobserved process of evolution, or change in species over time, and in fact explained the rise of new species from the contingent history of previous ones.

As P.Z. says, that makes today a scientific Independence Day.

G’head and celebrate by blowing some fireworks up or somethin’.