Nothing of Note

I know its been forever since I posted, more on that shortly, but now an amusing aside. We were at the National Gallery of Art and ran into a large contingent of the Red Hat society, a group of women who get together to go to events and museums while wearing red hats.

One of the group had a huge diamond pin on her hat which read "Vice Queen." She was evidently leading the group that day as befitted her office. But all I could think of at the time was "what level of blatant perverse debauchery does one have to sink to to be awarded the diamond crusted vice queen award?

What does this say about me?

Okay something a bit lighter

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen movies you've seen that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what movies my friends choose. (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note -- upper right hand side.) I don't actually tag people, do it or not its your call.

(I had to annotate my list, I couldn't help it, I am an annotator)

1. Mama Mia (the best Shakespeare mash-up ever and I think it had some music)
2. Army of Darkness (Groovy)
3. Planet of the Apes (1968)( A better metaphor for modern American life I could not name. We are beset on all sides by the brutes but discover in the end it is a world of our own making. The Simpsons said it best in their Planet of the Apes musical, “OHHHHHH, You’ve finally made a monkey out of meeeeeeeeeeee!”)
4. His Girl Friday (This is the movie I watch when I think I want to be Cary Grant)
5. The Godfather (Kind of like being a Red Sox fan, you’re annoyed that everyone else is now, but hey what can you do)
6. Blade Runner (Rutger Hauer with a dove in a speedo, not so much an impression as a mental scar)
7. Three Musketeers (1973) ( I wanted to be one of these guys when I grew up…and still kind of want to be one)
8. True Romance (the most romantic of the guy and girl take convertible and go on crime spree movies, ten years ago I would have chosen Natural Born Killers, now its Romance)
9. Magnolia (Profound in a Boogie Nights making Fiona Apple dating kind of way)
10. Being There (I feel like Peter Sellers in this movie on many, many days)
11. On the Beach (I was sure the world would end in a Nucelar Holocaust for a month after I saw this movie)
12. Evita (Not a good movie, but I still sing Don’t Cry for me Argentina at the drop of a hat)
13. Schindler’s List (Just the use of shadow, alone, would have made this movie memorable)
14. Blood of Heroes (dialogue of such perfect incoherence that it has become poetry, an example, “I've broken juggers in half, smashed their bones, left the ground behind me wet with brains. There's nothing I wouldn't do to win. But I never hurt anyone for any reason other than putting a dog's skull on a stake.”)
15. Casablanca (best American Movie of the 20th century, so good the whole thing became a cliché)

Okay abort now if you don't want to here about the Healthcare Fight:

What follows is a debate I am having on facebook with an old friend on that fight, and I just think its illustrative about how the right is fucking with people's heads about this. This is a good guy I am talking to, but like so many Americans he thinks he's actually hearing news when all he's doing is hearing and repeating propaganda. (The only edits are the names which I dropped)

( Read more... )

My great grandfather and the meat tenderer, now on google.

Its weird how these things come floating by from time to time.

* A late edit* Sue says we got to build it, its my birthright and she always needs to tender meat.

Stolen from a friend because none of it matters.




From: http://www.smbc-comics.com/ because there's stealing and then there's stealing.

My wife was going on about a friend of ours the other day. She told me not only is she taller (she is quite tall), employed full-time (she is an RN), has a better house (and fully renovated), but she keeps everything in her home spotless (her kids are actually neater than we are).

I told my wife that I would always prefer her to our friend because Sue has one thing Leann will never have...extremely low standards in husbands.

She was not as amused as I had hoped.

I was at a conference today which was full of what I call Buzz Verbing. That's where you turn a buzzword noun into a verb in order to indicate that you plan to do it.

Thus, "visioning," "synergizing," "architecting," and "cohorting." But my personal favorite has to be "cloud visioning," which is the process of thinking about how we can use cloud computing to solve our data problems.

There was a terrible accident on the D.C. metro this evening, two trains collided and a bunch of people are dead. My whole family was on that same train yesterday, and I am on it tomorrow and Wednesday.

A quick scene from my life.

Standing in a neighbor's yard on Saturday afternoon, beer in hand, very suburban. Its a party for Loving Day, which celebrates the end of legal restrictions on inter-racial marriage. Mazey doesn't believe it was ever true that her friend's parents could not have married.

Jim and Jim, the gay couple from across the street, aren't present but walk by a little later.

Her kids should not believe her when she tells them that they couldn't get married either.

Cormac McCarthy is moving up my author’s list fast. I just finished “The Road” and am quite preoccupied with it. It is a stunning novel, and deeply masculine. It is one of those books that I found worked on many levels.

At one level, it is about parenthood and the singularity of purpose that this creates in one. It’s about the road we are all on. Sometimes we are the Man, sometimes the boy, and no matter how much we want it to be otherwise the road ends in death. The relationship as a parent is what gives them purpose and separates them from the hopeless pilgrims and cannibals. If we are lucky, the road ends for the parent and we have let the child go on without us, but the road doesn’t end. The journey is the complete purpose in itself.

At another level, it’s the anti-Walden (or possibly existential Walden). The man does indeed "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived," but the natural world is here only honored in the breach. The essential facts of life, the deliberate life is present not as flowing from nature but from the utter annihilation of nature. In this aspect, it is as deeply powerful an environmental book as Thoreau’s. It is a Walden for a time where we have finally worked out our own destructive power.

By coincidence, I saw “No Country for Old Men” this weekend. It was set in exactly the part of the world (in both time and space) I’m from, and the dialogue, story and characters were perfect. It explored the themes I discuss above of humanity, masculinity and deliberateness. Then it adds in the subject of fate and chance and free will into the impossibly hard and violent landscape.

What’s funny, is that both of these works are labeled as being so pitch dark, and yet I don’t find myself depressed by them at all (in contrast I found No Country's Oscar competitor "There will be Blood" very much a downer). I find them strangely more about living than all the dying that goes on in both. It’s odd.

I have just found through Photbucket Statistics that this picture of my daughter Mazey:



has been viewed 4,264 times. Making it 20 times more popular than any other picture in any album I have. Apparently, it was linked to by a Peter Pan website.

Odd but fun.

We bought a mini-van ...

Here's what happened. Our Subaru was hit head-on by a french teacher in a honda. She was shuffling cd's, or playing with her cell phone, or possibly conjugating irregular verbs, and went over the double yellow and BAM! This is a dispassionate way of saying she had her head up her ass and ran straight into my wife and kids. Luckily no on was seriously hurt, Sue was banged up but other than seatbelt strap bruises the kids were untouched.

I felt that this entirely justified the hours spent studying the safety records and recommendations on both cars and car seats.

The insurance company has been great and we decided that it might be time to take the dreaded step into a somewhat larger vehicle. Its seems like every time we have turned around lately, we have bee involved in some kind of caravan of cars to some kids event or outing or the like. We look like the worlds most boring parade pulling into the zoo. So, the mini-van. We ruled out any affordable SUV's as both less fuel efficient, less safe, and frighteningly easy to run over small children with. So, the mini-van. I said what about the big VW wagons, nope, lower safety and reliability. So, the mini-van...

We settled on the Honda, and I began the exquisite dance of car negotiation. 5 dealerships, all willing to give invoice minus factory and dealer incentives, but only after hours of car dealer theater. Literally, three different dealers, using widely varying approaches (the brutally honest guy, the internet dame, the "going-to-take-care-of-you-my -friend") arrived within $2 of one another on their lowest price. We ended up buying a blue van, a difficult color to get apparently, but not easily. It turned out there was one on a boat, possibly in Baltimore harbor but equally likely in the hands of Somali pirates who had too much inventory. After two days of waiting, I suspect while the pirates were test driving the van with an outing to that Baltimore landmark Larry Flynt's Hustler club, we are finally going to take possession.

So, a mini-van...

Sue: Anyway, Leann was telling me that Miles is always correcting people who say Mazey's his best friend. He tells them, I am going to marry Mazey.

Mazey: I like Miles, when we are teenagers we are going to have sleepovers all the time.

Me: Or maybe when you're in first grade, that could work instead...

(she's 4, I was supposed to have a few years before this started)

austenheroin had this on her journal and I am shamelessly jumping in and doing it as well. So, here’s my top ten desert island book list:

1. The Odyssey – Homer
2. The Rainbow – D. H. Lawrence
3. Candide – Voltaire
4. The Good Soldier Svejk – Jaroslav Hasek
5. Hyperion – Dan Simmons
6. Steel Beach – John Varley
7. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
8. War Music – Christopher Logue
9. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
10. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

But that is just the appetizer for some additional thinking I have been doing about books in general. I am trying to write and offended by the publishing industry and pondering the idea that writing in a traditional sense is basically a dying industry. I got to thinking about this after three things happened:

1. a colleague waved their shiny new Kindle at me a declared it the future of books (yuck),

2. I have been living up to the old faculty joke: Professor 1 asks professor 2, “what are you working on?” Professor 2 responds, “I am deep in preparing my second book.” Professor 1 responds “Yeah I am not writing either.” Progress has not been spectacular.

3. I listened to this episode of the Kojo Nnamdi show on The Future of Books in which they predicted that the value of content would fall to essentially zero, while the value of the social experience of sharing the knowledge will rise exponentially. Basically, the value of creating a space for people to write marginal notes about your work will exceed that of the work itself. The analog being that the trading of music files and proliferation of listening options has caused the value of produced music to plummet and placed the value in venues, live performance and fan base.

I am thinking of starting either a blog or livejournal community which will provide a space for me to work on two projects (plus one more):

1. Writing this dammed second book. I plan to post weekly updates on the process I am going through and use the pressure of the process to help keep it moving forward. In addition, I hope it might attract some of the kind of feedback that will both test the ideas and prepare the groundwork for publication.

2. Explore the possibility of developing an open source set of anthropology text books. I continue to be horrified by the cost of textbooks used in my courses, when I don’t actually believe there is any point to them anymore. There have been some discussions around the web, and I would like to see if we might get something going, possibly around the open source model used in software development.

3. See if anyone else wants to do similar sorts of projects and use the space to develop them.

I am going to poke around for existing venues on these subjects but I suspect the fairly specific nature of these projects may limit my options.

It happened yesterday.

I was at a meeting and we were waiting for a late arrival. We started talking about about how none of us went to school in this state. I mentioned Southern Methodist and was immediately greeted by a chorus of "that's where the building the Bush library." Now I said this was going to happen (check # 4), but that did little to improve my mood.

I loathed W way before it was the in thing to do (indeed all the way back to his defeat of the great Ann Richards in the Texas gubernatorial race in 1994), but this adds a whole new dimension to it. For the rest of the world he has left the stage, but for me the bastard just does not go away.

Flaneur - Basically a laconic stroller out to experience a city, but with annoyingly pretentious overtones to the term.

Still a fun word.

I did it on Facebook, but I don't want to neglect my livejournal friends

My 25 random things
Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

1. I have a lacquered frog mariachi on my desk, he is playing a guitar and holding a postcard which reads “Neparkovat” (No Parking in Czech)

2. My publisher completely lost my book, he still plans to publish it but cannot locate it or the editing at all. (I am mailed him a new copy)

3. I am happier than I can ever remember being.

4. I seem to be smiling less in pictures than I can ever remember.

5. I like my internet-only friends because you can keep it light even when things are heavy.

6. In 2008 my interest in poetry took a maudlin emo turn, I am in a 12 step program.

7. I have failed to learn to play the guitar for 6 straight years.

8. I have not given up trying to learn to play the guitar.

9. I have pretended to be Captain Hook so much that kids at Mazey’s pre-school call me “Pirate Man” and the Rabbit says “Daddy Bad Guy”, its enough to make one shove someone off a plank.

10. I have a terrible case of wanderlust and really want to go back overseas for a few years.

11. My current favorite joke: During a recent check-up the doctor says to me, “you have really got to stop masturbating.” I ask, “why, doc?” He replies “because we’ll never get thru this examination otherwise.”

12. IMHO Planet of the Apes (the Heston version of course) remains the most perfect metaphorical exploration of man’s life in modern society ever.

13. I keep a bottle of Cambodian whiskey with a snake preserved in it on the shelf in my office.

14. You’ll know I have had an apocalyptically bad day if my facebook status reads, “Ben is drinking the Cambodian Snake Whiskey”

15. I have not nor do I plan to read: The Da Vinci Code. Nothing against it but reading it now would be like deciding American Idol sounds like something that might catch on.

16. I have been gone from the Southwest long enough now that I cannot eat enough Mexican food while visiting to fill my soul, my stomach yes, but not my soul.

17. See what I mean about the maudlin.

18. I create playlists to think about specific people, you have probably been assigned a song if you are reading this. (You may not like what I have chosen)

19. I have occasionally woken up with the absolute certainty that a zombie uprising has occurred during the night.

20. I try not to act disappointed when this turns out to be the product of bad movies and bad nachos.

21. The girls and I are already planning this year’s Halloween party, it will only be scary for 2 and 4 year olds, but it’s a start.

22. For a brief period in the autumn of 1995, I was actually cool. It was unsightly and everyone involved covered their eyes and walked away quickly. The problem has not returned.

23. I like meeting the children of old friends because seeing them reminds me of those friends when they were young, also we all look slightly ridiculous being parents.

24. Bruce Willis narrated a documentary I was in.

25. I knew I had to actually do this when the Post ran a story making fun of filling out the 25 things memes, I would not want to be mistaken for someone out in front of an internet trend.

No more tags, I tagged on facebook and felt dirty doing it even then. If you are reading this and want to share, please do.

I hate the whole "boys act this way and girls act this way thing" with which we parents are bombarded constantly. Beyond the fact that it defies a century of social scientific understanding, it simply does not seem to match up with what I see on a daily basis. This isn't to say there aren't some differences.

Take this morning for example, my girls spent the morning engaged in an almost continual (friendly) death match. They just did it in a pink-tinted idiom. They started wrestling with hugs and kisses which eventually led to tackles and takedowns. They moved on to armed conflict, but when unable to locate their swords, they used sparkle coated fairy wands to battle across the breakfast table. When Mazey attempted to develop a simple spoon-powered catapult, we declared an armistice.

Different? Maybe more glittery, but not so different I think.

A little unscientific survey, who's feeling the economic downturn and how? (This is for you lurkers too)

Here, Jobs seem secure but I have 5 days unpaid furlough before July. My neighbor got laid off from his 100k job with 3 hours notice. And everyone has a slightly worried look about them. How about you?

My interest in poetry has become maudlin.

My lists of to-do's for the new year have become New Year's resolutions, which I oppose on principle.

My new IPod makes me feel very 2006, but I like it.

My daughters received foam swords for Christmas and now salute each other with them before fighting.

Umberto Eco's most recent book seems to have defeated me.