odds and ends...

Cleaning out the photos from my phone, I come across these little chuckle-worthy bits:
The funniest parts about this poster is where it's located. Above a urinal at eye level. "Touch consumers"? Wow, now that's powerful campaign. It can reach out and grab your junk while you're taking a whizz. And yes, that's a low-distraction moment. Just me and my wang. Even if there is another guy pissing, it's not like we're having an in-depth conversation or anything.

A palette of parts, and apparently the empty palette should be returned to an android. Hopefully no one at Cyberdyne Systems knows about this.
Hmm... so there's D/s, B/D, S/M, BDSM, and an infinite variety of kinks out there. Auto-domination too, apparently.

Bacon-pa-looza

For some reason I got it in my head to soak and cook some black-eyed peas, but without a plan for a meal. So I find myself looking in Bittman, and find out that I need some slab bacon or other pork product... and off I go to the Kroger around the corner. What I find, and cannot seem to live without, is a spectrum of the salted pork products, which I find myself chuckling at when I got home. Sure, all the Vegans and Veggies will be horrified, but hopefully this is somehow set off by the recent delight I have found in tempeh. And if I ever need to defend myself against roving bands of veggies, I'm sure Matt, Jeff, Warren, and other bacon enthusiasts will back me up on the pork product issue.

As I'm slicing the fat off the salted pork, I can help but hear the line "richest creamiest fat in the world..." repeating over and over in my head.

While seeking out aformentioned pork products, I walk past this label, and double-triple-take ("as the vivacious feline makes her way into the delta of the alleyway" - 10 points and a slice of bacon to whoever can name the song without reaching for a search engine. Bonus points and a full breakfast if you know the whole song/poem) as I pass by this label. I swear the first time I saw it, it was Dirt Green Tea. "Now who the heck would want any of that?"

And then this afternoon in the bank parking lot, I walked over this sad little scene. This poor little pipe fitting, forever embedded in the asphalt, never to be a proper pipe fitting in the wild and woolly world out there. How very, very sad.

So yeah, that was my afternoon/evening.

Oh yeah, I got on the bike and went to crit practice. It was hot out. My fitness is lacking. I was slow, and fell off the back lots of times.

Let's not talk about it... mmmkay?

Icelanders/shark

Seems like a lot of work to eat an animal full of toxins. Don't they have baby seals to eat?

notable quotables

mental debris of late, accumulating and peeking out here and there...


"Nearly all men can withstand adversity. But if you want to test a man's character, give him power"

- Muneer Malik
(president of the supreme court bar association in Pakistan speaking at a seminar and addressing the Musharef/Judicial situation, but telling a truth that applies far and wide)

"'You don't need to' I say, 'you are normal.'... I cannot say the rest, that I think, that he is easy in his body, that he sees and hears and tastes and smells and feels what others do, so his reality matches theirs."

- from The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
(while about the interior world of a man with autism, the notions of consensual reality in the "normal" world apply too)

"He was a fierce satirist of his own culture, but nursed what he called a 'romantic love' for the U.S. For him, the country represented a vigorous modernity, unencumbered by history."

- blurb on the wall about artist George Grosz next to his work on display at the Walker Art Center (which seems so relevant in these days... while the U.S. is a relatively new nation compared to old world european nations, we're accumulating baggage and becoming encumbered by our own history more and more)

"It's really easy to get out of the habit of intimate socializing"

- excerpt from The Amazing Adventures of Captain Bland and Dr. Sabbatical

"You there... able-bodied lazy rich white girl. Yes, you... You are not old, injured or incapable. Pick up your fucking feet when you walk. You are lazy shuffling moron, and showing contempt for the soles of your shoes (and the pavement) only proves how spoiled and worthless you are."

- Me

roll-a-dahby/run-run-run the weekend

An action-packed weekend it was... Not only did I get flashed (and offered to have the sweat licked off me) by ****y [Who shall remain nameless, to protect the guilty. You know who you are, Madam Feistiness.] during the Normal Park yard-sale-a-palooza, but Stacey and I went to the Derby. Roller Derby, that is.

It seems that Detroit has quite the roller derby league going on, and it's a nationwide phenomenon to boot. I didn't quite know what to think going into it. There's so much pagentry and attitude about it, I was partly suspecting that it was more entertainment than competition - a la WWF/WCW/world-wrestling-whatever. But after the first period, I got a better idea of what's going on in the rink (er, I mean "flat track" - do they have banked oval derby leagues? apparently so). In the second period, skaters were starting to work harder so the spectacle of it gave way to the competition of it. And regardless of the fact that Stacey and I didn't have nearly enough tattoos to be considered as part of the cool kids, it was a pretty good time. You know there's hilarity to be ensuing when a couple hours before going out, sitting on Stacey's porch with folks drinking beer, T says "you're going to roll a doobie?" "uh... no, we're going to The Roller Derby." Freudian slip of the ear? You be the judge.

And then on Sunday came the Dexter-Ann Arbor Run. I didn't run (translation: "hell with that.. running is too much work"), but volunteered to help out with lead-biking the course for the half-marathon and calling in times as the leader passed mile-markers. I wasn't expecting to get soaked by rain on the ride out to the start in Dexter though...

Anyhoo, I'm not a runner, but this I do know: when a runner can hit the 10-mile mark at 47 mins, they are a bad-ass mofo. Sub 5-minute miles for 13 miles? Wow. The dude who won (Alene Reta) was leading from the start - a group of 4 off the front in the first 1/2 mile split to 2 by the 4th mile, and then Reta started slowly pulling away from home-town favorite Brian (who had quite the cheering section along the course, I might add), adding about 5 seconds of lead every time he passed a mile marker.

Pretty big turnout for what seems like a local thing - thousands of people. I heard a bunch of different numbers - there was a bib# 3000 among the marathoners apparently, but registration was 2300. In the 10k, Suzanne said she finished mid-pack at 900th, and if you guess at the number of 5k-ers, I'll go with something on the order of 5000-8000 people total. And then at the end of it all, it rained again. But I had already been wet and gritty for a couple hours already.

After the running stuff, a shower, and a disco-nap for me, some folks met up at Connor O'Neill's to celebrate Suzanne's birthday and running of the 10k. Fred was in town for a wedding and came out and hung out, drinking beer and chatting with Georgina and I in multiple pubs about multiple topics, which was so much more than fun. Quite the fortuitous opportunity - Fred getting to meet and chat with G before our roadtrip up to the Twin Cities. I'm pretty stoked about it, and am not only glad that we'll get to hang out with Fred and Mona and the kids (in between my goofing off/riding the bike/touristing, and G's intensely worky researchy city-archive-digging), but thankful to them being gracious hosts and putting us up for the week. Heck, I'm even stoked to be manslaving to progress their house remodel/redecorate/rewhateveryoucallit.

fingers

A dream that comes back in snippets occasionally - about fingers. Five of them (ok, 4 and a thumb). I'm walking through Home Depot, for some reason looking behind a shelf/display, and seeing 5 severed fingers just sitting there on top of an old spool of wire. The spool is dusty, but the fingers are fresh (but not oozing, which is clearly a continuity problem in my dream). There's no one around, so I pick them up, thinking "someone is gonna need these"

From there, I wander around the store, 5 non-oozing fingers in my hand, sometimes doing my shopping along the way, not trying to conceal the fingers, but I recognize how disturbing it might be for people to see severed fingers in a fellow shopper's hand. The thing is, I don't have a speck of self-consciousness in this... I'm ok with the fact that I have someone else's fingers in my hand. I came by them honestly, and I mean to do good by them. It's just kinda weird that they were just left there. You'd think someone would care about them more.

One "dream symbolism" site says: "To dream that your fingers are injured or have been chopped off, denotes your anxieties about your ability to accomplish some demanding task or perform in some waking situation." and "To see a wire in your dream, symbolizes your short but frequent journeys. To see old or rusty wire in your dream, signifies your bad temper." and "To see a spool in your dream, symbolizes your need for order and structure. Things need to be neat." And if I paid attention to horoscopes and other malarkey, I would say "[shrug] well, 2 out of 3 ain't all that wrong"

... but see, they're not my fingers. Is it a conservation thing? (trying to clean up a little and just waiting to walk past a garbage can) It is anxieties about someone unknown to me? (someone else's fingers)

Or is it just weird middle-of-the-night meanderings of my brain? It's not lost on me that there seems to have been product placement/branding in my dream. Who put that in there?

randoms

In my non-posting-for-a-while, little things been building up... like the recent book club selection The Brief History of the Dead, which, though initially promising, was ultimately disappointing. Too many concepts not fleshed out. Too many suspensions of disbelief required. Too many ideas included when they were only fleeting distractions and would've better been left out. I did like the cover art though, which reminded me of an "empty coat" sculpture at the Walker Art Center sculpture garden... which is, by the way, a pretty damn nice place. I wish there were more sculpture gardens in the world. Especially in the world near where I live, dammit.

My folks live near the Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park and it's pretty nifty to have something like that right in the neighborhood. Especially since it essentially is re-purposing land-fill-ish land that borders one of the sanitary canals (er... I mean "water reclamation district"). When I was a kid, it was just this crappy stretch next to the canal. Now it's a perfect place for a post-dinner walk. Except of course, that I don't live there any more. That's a bummer.

And lastly, while rummaging about in some old photos, I came across this little gem... (if you're squeamish, probably best not to look at the full-sized photo). Kind of wacky, that a bird would get caught like that. I mean... it's not like the bridge is moving fast or anything. Not like the bridge can deviate from its course... Slow and ponderous river-spanning monstrosity, but somehow this avian dumbass managed to get killed by... a bridge. It probably better for the survival of the species that this one won't get to breed any more. A pigeon-ey kind of Darwin Award.

Everything Falls Apart

... and no, I'm not talking about the Hüsker Dü song (but thems some fine, fine tunes that I haven't listened to in a long damn while).

Everything is just... falling apart. Yesterday I was utterly incapacitated by what I thought was food poisoning. Basically, I was unable to stand or walk for most of the day in between the 7 vomit and 4 diarrhea episodes. (how do you count it when you have to puke in the wastebucket because you're still sitting on the toilet? Count one each? Count it by who got there first? Or by volume?). I recently on a lark bought a raw honey spread, and thinking it might be food poisoning, called my county health department to report it. The kind and understanding health professional suggested that my symptoms sounded more like Norovirus than food poisoning. (and apparently there's a Farmington strain too! Named for Farmington Hills! right here in Michigan! how proud we all must be...[sigh])

Since I'm much better now, I'm guessing it was the virus, but I'm not having any unpasteurized anything any time soon. I do like Louis Pasteur and his invention. I think it has saved a lot of people from pain and early death. Not only did he develop/refine the germ theory of disease but he discovered chirality too. How frickin' cool is that? I LOVE that. So to all you raw-milk-drinkin' "cherry-juice-is-a-cure-for-cancer" homeopathy crazy-talkers: keep that crazy talk at home. I got no tolerance for ya, and if you start in with it, I'm gonna share my feelings with you in an enthusiastic way.

So yeah... not only was I hurtin' furious yesterday, I come home today to find the floor lamp with a blown bulb.

And then the desk lamp has a blown bulb.

While I'm changing the desk lamp, it breaks off in my hand. What the hell - two in the same day? Coincidence? You think I should stay away from the computer for a while?

'Tucky Travels

Got back from Mammoth Cave Kentucky last week... a fun enough adventure, but not exactly life-changing experience either. On a scale of 0 to 10, I'd give it a 6.5, maybe 7. No catastrophes, no ecstasies either.

Got kind of a late start on Sunday, leaving around 11-ish, and for the 6-7 hour drive, that unfortunately meant setting up camp (and then cooking dinner) at the park in the dark. This would become a theme for the week: being too optimistic about time, and thus perfecting my skills at pitching a tent and cooking/cleaning without the benefit of sunshine. And while camping is certainly a cheaper way to travel than hotel, I wasn't exactly happy to pay $17 per night in the main campground. $17? For what? A plot of dirt? Sure, there's running water and toilets, but no showers (gotta pay $2 at the store for that). Whatever.

Monday was Cave Day, and I, surprisingly, got an early start. (whenever I'm sleeping somewhere new, I usually wake a dozen or so times in the night). And thus, began my second disappointment. The Wild Cave Tour is weekends only, and sells out months in advance. Crapola. Instead, I picked the Grand Avenue and Historic tours. And this is where I have henceforth solidified my new policy about trails, routes, tours, and vacations. If it is a "wilderness" area and it DOESN'T have safety warnings... it's probably pretty boring. Anything that has paved trails, is stroller-accessible, and has bathrooms nearby is likely to be jammed with slow-moving groups of retirees and children bouncing all over the place. I'm not hatin' on your sprogs, I just happen to be child-free, healthy, and adventurous. When I'm looking for grandeur of nature, I would rather it wasn't corrupted by constant yelling of 5-year-olds. It wasn't just me... the kind, gentle, mother-of-two who couldn't get her point across to the non-parenting parents of the uncontrollable child, even after resorting to shouting over her shoulder at least five times "Kid! I can't hear...will you SHUT UP!"... she wasn't enjoying the distraction, either. It is also, I found, very difficult to take casual photos in caves. Flashes wash things out, or fail to illuminate the nifty dark recesses. All I was left with was random shots of the backs of heads of my fellow tour-goers. If you want to see pretty photos, buy the postcards.

The Historic Tour was pretty interesting - about how the cave was used as a residence 4000 years ago and then more or less abandoned 2000 years ago by Native Americans, then re-discovered explored back in the 1800's by settlers, how it went from being a tourist destination to an industrial saltpeter operation, then becoming a tourist destination again, imagining exploring massive chambers by the light of a feeble oil lamp, etc. After 7 hours of tours, I realized that sunshine wasn't going to last forever, so I got the bike together and went on a quickie ride. Half hour out and back... then dinner and sleep.

Tuesday was Bike Day and Backpacking Day 1. The whole point of going to Kentucky, along with the 80-degree temps and one-day drive, is that it has a few hills (ok, more than SE Michigan). So in the morning I pack up my tent, organize food for 3 days of packing, organize bike stuff, and head off to the trailhead where I'll park my car, go for a long-ish ride, then come back and hike off in to the wilderness. The ride, she was a decent one. As I was rolling away from the car I thought "hmm, planning to be out for at least 4 hours... should I have put on sunscreen? Nahh... I'll be fine..." Well, I crisped a little bit, but the good news is that my teensy-bit of sunburn is turning into a very respectable start to my tan lines for the season. A decent ride was had. I was fortunate to find that the area around the park has rather smooth roads, with fairly light traffic - probably due to there being no heavy truck traffic and fairly mild winters. The shoulder ain't none too wide, but what with all the plants budding and whatnot, it was a pretty ride. Most all the car/truck traffic was easy to get along with - with the requisite one asshole shouting something out the window as he passes in his jacked-up Ford penis-substitute. (why is it that assholes on the road always seem to be driving Ford vehicles? GM, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, none seem to attract the Asshole Gene quite as much as Ford Trucks).

So nothing gonzo about the ride, just putting in base miles with some of them uphill, and after getting back, stowing the bike, and a brief snack/rest put on the pack and head off on the trail. While it was nice that backcountry permits at this park are free (compared to out West - where I'd imagine the backcountry fees help offset the occasional cost of having to rescue someone injured, lost, or stranded) the trails themselves aren't that interesting. Unfortunately, I neglected to register on the map that there are occasional dirt roads through the area, and after hiking 5 miles with a full pack, crossing a road is aggravating. "If you can drive to this spot, why am I hiking it?" This gets back to my new policy about accessibility - a.k.a. "If It's Easy, It Can't Possibly Be Interesting"

Anyway, I got to the first backcountry site, and lo and behold a spring flowing out of the side of a hill, right next to the campsite. The last time I went packing was in the desert. Where getting water was sketchy. This was luxury. All the water you could drink, and not having to worry about whether there will be water anywhere near the next campsite. Heck, I crossed stream after stream on the hike. So why was I carrying 4 liters? Habit, I guess. Better safe than sorry.

I got there in just enough time before sunset to gather some firewood, so after cooking dinner I had a cheery little fire, stared at the sky for a while, and went to bed. 4am rolled around and the first few pitter-pats of rain was joined by "oh, shit... my gear is outside", but after some quick barefoot half-clothed pack-grabbing, I was back in my tent with gear safe and dry, when the pouing rain lulled me right back to sleep. After a leisurely breakfast the next morning, off I go to the second site by the river, and though it was pretty, it seemed that the further you get from the trailhead, the more likely people are to leave garbage all over the place. I ended up packing out 2x more of other peoples garbage than I created myself. Aggravatin', lemme tell ya.

I really wanted to go for a swim. I hadn't showered in a couple days, plus it was hot and a little sticky, and I hadn't gotten all of the road grit from the ride off me. But the Green River is... opaque. And, it seems, I'm a pussy. Apparently, when I'm alone out in the wilderness, I have an attack of age and responsibility. As in - when the edge of the river has rough and sharp rocks on the bottom that I can't see, and then suddenly the bottom drops away, I get a case of the willies. Imagining spraining an ankle, or stabbing my foot on something when I'm miles away from anything other than a basic first aid kit kept me close to shore. I guess I need to find a Cross-Country Adventure Buddy for these trips... it's nice to find solitude, but it's also nice to share the load, tell stories, and have backup in case one does something stupid and injures ones self.

I had gotten to campsite #2 mid-afternoon, so I spent the whole afternoon lounging about. I made some tea, sat and watched the river, constantly fussed with the little ThermaRest chair I got last year (it's more comfortable than rocks, but never quite right), and read the last half of In A Sunburned Country which, while humorous, started to grate on me with the same funny story/revelation over and over again. Yes, Australia is full of poisionous critters that will be happy to kill you. Yes, Australia has a huge and desolate interior. Yes, modern Australians are on average an amazingly warm and generous bunch of folks. We heard it in the first 100 pages... get on with it. In contrast with those two product disappointments, I'm very happy with my new MSR Dragonfly. After borrowing Jake's Whisperlite last year, I realized I really need to get my own stove. A stove that can reliably burn white gas, kerosene, gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel? Works for me.

Heading out the next day on the way back to the trailhead and the drive home, I passed by the strangest little cemetary. Yes, it was old, but why do some of the headstones just look like just a plain rock with no engraving? And why are they all spaced so closely together? Turns out to be a children's cemetary. Very few of the headstones indicate a life longer than 4 years. Some even have dates of birth and death the same day or only a few days apart. And they're all in the mid-1920's. Just kind of odd at the time to stumble onto this. Was is an illness that swept the area in that time? There's a regular cemetery at the historic church near the trailhead - why are the children's bodies buried 2 miles away up in the hills? Ah, mystery.

And in the end, a non-climatic journey home. I decided not to stop in Fort Knox (can't take a tour anyway), Louisville (don't really care much for baseball bats), Cinncinati (I'll see it some other time), or anywhere else. So here I am. Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

blah.

Haven't posted in a while - I guess there just hasn't been a whole lot going on that I want to post about. I didn't post a review of Beer Fest, but I'll get to that and just backdate the post (feels like cheating, but if I can bend time, that will lessen my pseudo-guilt about my perpetual tardiness). Went skating Wed. at lunch, thinking about going today... One thing on my wish list: how do you do a hockey stop? I'm not from "skating stock" - it's not part of my DNA. (but I'm a quick learner). It's just that there's something I feel I'm missing - do you curve into the stop like a french curve, jump into it, disconnecting from the ice and then chiseling, or do you skew off one foot and then bring the other around? Ah, one of these days I'll commit enough attention to it.
In the meantime, blah-dy-blah, whatever.

The Tin Man

If you're into the podcasts or other forms of interesting sounding radio/audio, you might want to check out The Tin Man story. (Heck, even if you're not into radio, you might find it fun. For other interesting stuff, be sure to check out lots of other stuff from our friends at the Third Coast International Audio Festival) Sure, the Tin Man story is a little heavy-handed with it's anti-corporation-we're-all-slaves-to-The-Man message, but along the way, the use/abuse of the Oz metaphor is hilarious, the voices are great, and the audio is entertaining. Think... StrongBad/HomeStarrRunner meets Wizard of Oz, meets Conspiracy Theorists, LLC.

tonguing the popcorn

A confession - I find huge pleasure tonguing dry popcorn. Say it loud, say it proud...

I tongue the popcorn.

When it's so fresh and dry that it squeaks, all you need to do is touch your tongue to it and leaps out of your hand. Like a frog grabbing a fly. Like Lucien's fondness for endives in Amelie, entertainment/joy had in the simplest of things.

cheese-rolling inuries

Who would have thought events involving cow's milk cheese could cause injury? Things like that never happen in the only other cheese-associated pastime I know of. I feel like I'm missing out.

Quotable nugget from the occasionally fun/occasionally tedious Terry Pratchett:

It was not anger AT anything. It was just pure, platonic anger from somewhere in the reptilian depths of the soul, a fountain of never-ending red-hot grudge; Mr. Tulip lived his life on that thin line most people occupy just before they haul off and hit someone repeatedly with a wrench. For Mr. Tulip, anger was the ground state of being."

Toast. It's the new black.

Everywhere I seem to turn, Toast has developed immense power. No, I'm not talking about raising a glass during a meal, or the software product, or the metaphor for kinky sex. It's not code for anything. We're talking bread, heated for a short period of time and thusly crispy.

Suddenly, everyone is REALLY into toast. It comes up in conversation for no apparent reason. To some, toast is comforting. To others, it's just for mornings. For the few and the proud, it's a late-night snack at 4am after a full night of multi-functional exhilaration.

I never knew it was so... [mmnh]... pivotal. All this time I've had a toaster and not known it's power to transform lives.

the trouble and dangerous

I just love translations of user manuals... There's always primo examples coming across the Pacific, but I still say that mid-90's Italian translations (yes, Campagnolo) were frickin' hiLARious.

lobsession

A typo that creates a word notion that's fun to play with... I was describing someone's unnatural obsession with user interfaces when I mis-typed it as "lobsession". It conjures an image in my mind - the lobbing of one's thoughts into a public space. Like brainstorming, but with slightly more connection to the idea - in traditional brainstorming, people are encouraged to not prejudge their thoughts before voicing them.

I'd propose that in a lobsession (Lob Session) one would have some ownership of an idea, and presumably it would be more developed than just something that just popped into your head. Thoughts can be outlandish in a lobsession, but they have to be Supportably Outlandish. They have to have backstory or be internally consistent or have continuity.

LRB Personals

There's actually a book of the best personals placed in the London Review of Books (current ads can be read here)

Enjoyable excerpts from this week:

My psychotherapist suggested I place this ad. Woman, 43. Not mental, despite whatever a fear of open spaces, the colour red, the sound of rain, plastic containers, beards, percussionists, birdsong and cornflakes may suggest Box no. 01/03

Anybody seen in a bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life." M, 43, failure, seeks F anywhere on the Arriva 333 route between Oare and Maidstone, for evenings cut short and diesel-choked embraces (the last bus leaves the Chequers Centre at 1817 and it's a long walk). Box no. 24/10

When eventually calming down after a heated argument involving smashed plates, thrown cutlery, insults directed at your circus side-show of a family, and emotionally destructive sex, you should know now that I’m very unlikely to participate in that ‘no, really, I’m sorry, it was my fault’ charade. You accept all of the blame all of the time or you grow gills to breathe in the stale, bitter soup of my angry and eternal silence. Cuddly F, 36, brown hair, green eyes, degree in geology Box no. 01/05

the Patron Saint of Venereal Disease and Hemorrhoids

not kidding... there really is one: Saint Fiacre. Along with a patron saint of locksmiths and bombardiers. (thanks Wikipedia!)

Happy post-solstice, Norteamericanos

In case you didn't notice, yesterday was the winter solstice and from here on out, the days get longer and the sun is out more and more. I, for one, am glad for this. It's about frickin' time. And that rain? In December? It kicks ass. Why? You don't have to shovel rain.