Jeff's Random Thoughts

In retrospect, some depressing advice

2010-02-16T23:45:00.001-05:00

I did a show today with a jazz trio. All of the musicians were college students, and better at jazz than I expected. One of them talked to me after the show; he's working towards a degree in sound engineering, and wanted to know if I had any deep insights into the profession or the academic side. My first piece of advice is universal: be the guy everyone wants to work with. Don't complain, be helpful, learn more than just your job, be friendly and pleasant and good at what you do. There are jerks in the field -- as in any field -- but when they get hired, it's in spite of what they are, not because of it. They'd be better respected if they kept the same degree of competence, with much less attitude. I stand by this piece of advice, and would gladly offer it to anyone in any field, professional or personal.

The other piece of advice was in answer to the question, "what advice would you give yourself when you were starting college, knowing what you know now?" And the answer was improvised, sincere, and surprising. My advice was roughly this: run from this profession as fast as you can. I've got one of the better jobs in my field, and in a lot of ways, my job sucks -- way too much unpaid overtime, a bit too little respect, and I can feel myself sinking into a rut. There's an old management joke that condenses to, "I've got twenty years of experience!" --"No, you've got one year of experience, repeated twenty times." And I can feel myself starting to sink into that; I have to work to keep my attitude fresh, and it's getting harder.

If I had to give my younger self career advice, it'd be to work hard at something that paid well, and get good at it: go to med school, or study law. Some of my high school classmates are doctors and lawyers; they worked hard through school (though probably no harder than I did in undergrad, once I started taking it seriously), and worked hard afterward to establish themselves in their fields. And now, they're enjoying the benefits of all that work. They're still expanding, learning, growing, and their careers are at a healthy early-middle to middle stage, with good options for growth and moving forward -- and, they make at least three times what I do in a year, for almost certainly less work than I do. I've basically peaked in my current job, and almost peaked in my profession; unless I want to tour (which would feel like a step backward) or start a business, I'm as far as I can take my career.

I know a huge number of professional musicians. Most have day jobs, and of the rest, most are either living hand-to-mouth or have a spouse or partner who covers a lot of their financial needs. Music just doesn't pay well. And I know one musician in town, a sax man of much skill and talent, a few years older than me. He's not a full-time musician; he's a doctor, in a good specialty. He takes a lot of vacation, and when he does, he might go to New Orleans for a week and play sax with some serious blues musicians. Or he'll go to Chicago and study with jazz masters, or go to New York and take lessons and jam with some of the best musicians the city has to offer. Music is his hobby, but a serious hobby, and money is no issue. When he performs, he hires in some of the best backup musicians in Indy, even bringing in other horn players from out of town; he doesn't make anything on the gig, but he gets to play, and he pays his band well. He gets to be a serious musician, and he doesn't have to worry about making the mortgage payment. Plus, he has enormously more freedom than most professional musicians; he doesn't need to take bad jobs or work with jerks, because he doesn't need the money. His path strikes me as close to ideal, though it might not have when I was eighteen.

I have a moderate degree of envy for these people, really. I don't know if they are happier than me or lead better lives, but their collection of problems is different than mine. I occasionally wonder what my life would be like had I made different, smarter choices when I was younger. I wonder if there's an alternate-universe version of me who stuck with the original collection of science majors, who ended up starting a company and selling it for a fortune, who drives a new car and has free time and can travel at will and doesn't worry about the things I worry about. I'd like to believe that the alternate-universe me would feel a little envy for his alternate-universe clone who worked in the arts, the guy the band waves to when he walks into a bar....

Not really paranoid...

2010-01-23T14:48:00.001-05:00

According to T-shirt slogans everywhere, you're not paranoid if they really are out to get you. That said, we're reactivating our alarm system at home for the first time since we moved in. We've had two burglaries in the last week within 150' of our front door, and we're understandably nervous. We don't have nice stuff, but a burglar wouldn't know that until the damage was done. So we're embracing some necessary paranoia. I don't like the thought that an alarm system is a mandatory part of life in our neighborhood now, but we're getting in the habit of turning it on at night and whenever we leave the house. It's better than the low-grade dread I had been getting whenever I left the house; I was a low grade of constantly anxious that I'd come home to find the door glass smashed in, cats kicked around, and important stuff missing. The alarm system helps a bit with the anxiety.

The fact that the house had an alarm system was a real bonus when be bought it; we didn't find out until we moved in that the seller didn't know any of the codes for the system. In 2000, this was problematical. The alarm installer had gone out of business, and another company would gladly sell us a new system, or reinitialize the old one for a few hundred dollars. So I unplugged it and pulled the battery and it sat unused until this week. I'm still a bit amazed by technology these days; what was an insurmountable problem ten years ago, took me an hour with Google to resolve. That proprietary programming and set-up guide nobody had on hand or was willing to share: available for free on at least eight different websites in pdf format. The top-secret method for resetting the installer code, even after the original installer specifically locked out the reset feature: freely available in a five-year-old archived bulletin board discussion among alarm installers. We're living in the future, in a lot of ways I regularly take for granted, but I was amazed by the ease of solving a problem that wasn't really solvable ten years ago.

So I replaced the backup battery (which had died in ten unused years), reprogrammed the system myself from scratch after a hard reset, and reconnected the phone line to the autodialer. We've now got a fully functional alarm system. I've got new cat-proof motion sensors on order; in the meantime, the old ones are set at an angle such that a cat on the sofa won't set them off, but anyone coming in through a window will. I've got an unused zone, as well, so I'm thinking about adding a glass-breakage detector. This is still something the cats can set off accidentally, but I can work around this by removing all breakable cat-level glass from the entire house. Or maybe I'll just depend on the motion sensors.

As soon as I had finished programming and testing the alarm system, a neighbor dropped by and told me she had locked her keys in their detached garage, and couldn't get in the house or back in the garage. I went over to pick the lock on her garage door and let her in, and I made sure I locked the house and turned on the alarm system when I left. The universe seems to strongly prefer irony, and the most ironic possible moment for a break-in would be immediately after I installed an alarm, but didn't turn it on, while I was breaking in to someone else's place....

If you're keeping count...

2010-01-17T20:25:00.002-05:00

...we're now up to seven inside cats. We've still got Laura's original cat (Chaka), my favorite kitty add-on (Koko), and the two we've had for four or five years (Meeper/Jayne and Emmett). We've since added three rescue cats. We brought Bowie in when it got extremely cold, and she's still in until we get her spayed. We also acquired an extremely damaged kitten late this summer. We named her Picasso, then found out he was a she; she's now Picassa. She lost a fight* with a raccoon or opossum, and had serious, infected wounds. We did wound care, took her to the emergency vet for antibiotics and a huge abscess, and took her to Virginia to visit Laura's family so we wouldn't have to find friends willing to not only feed our menagerie, but also willing to do wound care and risk return trips to the vet. She's also inside until we get her spayed. The seventh still has no name; naming a cat is a precursor to keeping them inside, and I'm hoping to avoid that. We've been calling her some diminutive: Itty Bitty, Teeny, Micro Cat, something like that. And the vet just informed us that she's a he, which makes us nervous since we've got two unspayed females in the house and a lot of unsprayed furniture. It adds a certain urgency to getting them all spayed/neutered.

So that's it: seven cats, four of whom are permanent. The amount of upkeep on seven cats is surprisingly higher than for four. With seven cats at home, you can't travel -- or, you have to be willing to impose on friends to feed and water them and empty their litter boxes twice daily, which I'm not willing to do. Just asking someone to drop by daily seems like a huge imposition. It's also surprising how much more dirt and hair seven cats produce. I'm sweeping the downstairs twice a day, usually, and regretting it if I don't. I even have to clean the bathroom more frequently, for reasons I can't grasp.

There are perks of seven cats, too, especially because all of ours are friendly and willing to be lap cats. When I lay on the couch to write, it's not unusual to have three or four cats join me to keep me company and make snide remarks about what's on the computer screen. They're all cute, and they all get along well. But it'll be nice to reduce the census.

* I assume she lost, given that she was a tiny kitten. But I never did see the other party in the fight. Maybe she won; she is rather scrappy.

Reality in fiction: setting

2010-01-07T19:58:00.001-05:00

I'm having an internal debate (turning external now), about how realistic fiction needs to be. You can establish almost anything as part of your world, if you're writing fantasy of science fiction. Artificial gravity, warp drive, demon-summoning equations, slower-than-bullets energy weapons, magic swords: you can do almost anything in spec-fic genres. But for fiction set in our world, in the here/now, the options are more limited. You can set your story in a fictional location and invent the geography of, say, Felport or Pickaxe, to suit your story's needs. But if you set your story in an existing well-known locale like London or New York City, you need to stick with the real. You can't have Grand Central Station in Queens, you can't have Trafalgar Square in Leeds, and you can't see Hoboken from the roof of the Flatiron building.

But how deep does this detail mine go? If I describe a police station in New York*, does there really need to be a police station that matches my description? Is this a small enough detail that I can fictionalize it? If I mention a bar or restaurant at a specific corner, does that restaurant need to exist? At a finer level of detail, if I describe the restaurant as being run by a fourth-generation descendant of the man who originally opened the restaurant in 1902, does this history need to be accurate? I've heard that Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder novels are almost travelogues. When our hero walks around the corner from a specific apartment building and walks into a seedy bar, both the apartment building and seedy bar exist exactly as the author describes them; the seedy bar is probably owned by a person exactly as described in the book. Is this degree of realism, this extreme accuracy of locale, necessary?

I think I have a workable answer: if I'm setting the scene, I need to be accurate. Background details have to match reality. If a main character takes a cab from real point A to real point B, the scenery outside his window needs to be real. If my location is a real place, I need to respect the place and the people familiar with it. And I can't get any facts wrong.

But I can take much more liberty with anything that's central to my story. I can invent the coffee shop owned by my main character. I can invent a glitzy nightclub owned by the mafia don who ends up dead in chapter two, where half of the story takes place. I can create a townhouse that gets burned to the ground by the arsonist my detective is chasing, and avoid burning down any real buildings. I can't have London Bridge connect the wrong parts of London. But I can have my main character be the main architect of a new bridge linking Dover and Calais, the new (completely fictional) 25-mile span linking France and England, which is threatened by terrorists.

I'm still a bit fuzzy about the precise division between things you can invent for story reasons, and real-world details that writers need to report accurately. But for now it's less of an issue; The Novel is fantasy, so I can make up pretty much anything I want to make the story flow....

* As an outsider, it seems that 95% of the usage of "New York" means "New York City," and 90% of that usage refers specifically to Manhattan.

Another year

2010-01-01T19:39:00.003-05:00

I just reread my new-year's resolution from last year. It was pretty simple: finish a novel, no matter how bad. I didn't, and I have no good excuse. I've got a few bad excuses, of course. At the top of that list, I lost my part-time guy at work this year, and I worked an inordinate amount of unpaid overtime. This was a real problem; not only does the extra work cut into my writing time, it can leave me with very little mental energy to write. December was particularly bad. The first three weeks of the month, I had around 90 hours of unpaid overtime....

So, I'm planning on continuing last year's resolution: finish a novel. I've got a few much more minor plans: exercise regularly, take a real vacation, clean and organize the basement. But finishing the novel is the big one. Wish me luck.

The future (and past) of horror

2009-08-30T20:36:00.005-04:00

Warning -- this contains a few spoilers. So if you see a movie mentioned but haven't seen it yet, skip a few sentences.

In keeping with long-standing tradition, I rented a non-Laura-approved movie while she was out of town last week. The movie: Phantasm, which might have been 1979's creepiest movie*. I hadn't seen it since the late '80s, and was curious if it was still creepy. And, it really wasn't. I was almost impressed with how non-creepy, almost funny, some of the "scary" scenes were. I wonder how much of this is due to the evolution of film as a medium -- that is, due to the fact that today's audiences and filmmakers are so much more genre-savvy. And this works both ways. We're less scared by things that are now cliche; when we see a guy open a door from the right camera angle, we just know a bad guy's going to be standing behind the door when it closes; the first time we saw this happen (Halloween, I think), it made us levitate out of our seats. Also, a modern filmmaker has a different set of expectations to exploit. They know their audience, they take advantage of our assumptions, and those assumptions are different than they were 30 years ago.

I wonder how a 1979 audience would react to a really creepy modern movie -- The Grudge, maybe, or The Descent. I suspect they'd wet their pants. Some of the creep factor comes from our assumptions being broken; in the beginning of The Grudge, when Yoko peeks into the attic, we the audience are conditioned by years of horror movies to expect that it's a false alarm, that we're about to get a false scare, maybe a mannequin falling over or a cat jumping out. It's too early in the film for us to really meet the creepies. When the ghost grabs her, it's doubly shocking. It's a scare, and it was totally unexpected. Plus, the level of allowable gore has changed significantly; Phantasm's silver sphere spewing a stream of fake blood while attached to a man's head is less than a shadow of the moment in The Grudge when we meet the girl with her jawbone torn away, her tongue waggling in the gaping space.

Dehumanization is also creepy; Linda Blair's head spinning and her spider-walking down the stairs in The Exorcist were among the film's scariest moments, largely because she had blatantly crossed into the realm of no-longer-human. Phantasm tried this too, to less effect than The Exorcist, and extremely less effect than The Grudge. Phantasm's mutant dwarf reanimated-corpse attacks are much less creepy than the first time Toshio opens his mouth unnaturally wide and the only sound to emerge is the screech of a cat. We saw glimpses of this in some earlier movies, but the concept has been taken to a new height in recent years.

The Grudge is also scarier on a deeper level. The heroes in Phantasm learn of something odd going on in the old mortuary, and their quest for the film is to solve the mystery of what's happening, and to defeat the servants of evil (or aliens). In The Grudge, every character who enters the house dies. The quest is to figure out the house's history, mostly to pass the time until the evil that dwells there snatches you from between your own bedsheets after driving you insane with fear. There's no fighting the curse, no winning over evil; our heroes (and, by extension, the moviegoers who put ourselves in their shoes) are all doomed from the beginning. It's a more existential horror.

So, my question is: what will horror be like in another twenty-five years? What will they be doing then, that will make a 2009 audience member wet himself? Unless movies shift to virtual-reality simulators, I can't even guess at the next paradigm shift.
---
* 1979 was a good year for creepy movies, with The Amityville Horror, David Cronenberg's The Brood, John Carpenter's The Fog, and the film adaption of Stephen King's Salem's Lot....

Mouthy, for a cat

2009-08-25T20:47:00.002-04:00

I got home from donating platelets after work and decided to take a little nap on the couch. Unfortunately for the napping plans, the new kitten really wanted to play with me -- specifically, the head part of me. The following conversation ensued:

"Stop chewing on my ears, evil cat!"

Picassa raised her head. "I'll have you know that I'm not evil, and I can prove it."

"Okay, this I've got to hear."

"Well," she started, pondering her response while cleaning her claws, "evil is an abstract concept. And I am clearly a concrete kitten. Therefore I cannot possibly be evil."

I snickered. "There are so many logical fallacies in that argument, I don't know where to start."

Picassa shrugged, contemplating which of my ears looked like a better target. "I'm a kitten. You were maybe expecting Aristotle?"

Oh, yes -- this one is going to be a handful.

No Cash For Our Clunkers

2009-08-24T21:41:00.001-04:00

Laura and I briefly debated using the Cash for Clunkers program to get a new car. We didn't, partially because we can't afford a car payment at the moment, but mostly because our only government-defined Clunker is the Jeep, which Laura really likes. And you can't use the program to trade a Jeep for a newer Jeep. My 1995 Saturn with 140,000 miles on it that won't drive on the interstate: not a clunker.

But we thought about it. It's an interesting program. And we would love to own at least one vehicle that could drive more than 50 miles without needing some sort of major repair.

I thought about what this program is designed for. I'm a wee bit worried that it's the vehicular version of a sub-prime home loan. The target market consists of people driving old cars that are worth less than $4500 for a trade-in, and people whose older cars get poor mileage. This looks like they're selecting, to a large extent, for people who have never bought a new car before. To what extent are they pushing people who can't necessarily afford it into buying a new car?

We heard some fuss made about the fact that most of the cars purchased through the program are foreign cars. I'm fine with this. Detroit has spent decades cranking out inefficient, poorly engineered, poorly designed cars. They invented the concept of planned obsolescence, and now they're reaping the whirlwind. I feel utterly no pity for them. It's a shame so many good people are hurt by their impending doom, but the companies themselves are getting what they deserve.

Health Care Reform Made Simple

2009-08-24T10:22:00.000-04:00

Nobody asked me, but I came up with a brilliant solution for the health-care problem. Here goes:

Push the enrollment age for Medicare down to 60.

This is all kinds of brilliant, as far as I can tell. For one thing, any change will need to happen slowly, both to give people time to get used to the change, and to minimize negative economic impact. This is a tiny step. It also dodges pretty much all of the non-substantive arguments against health care reform, the ones bandied about on talk radio. It's an existing program, and it hasn't been self-funded for years anyway. And it won't require creating any new bureaucracy.

It'll also keep insurance for the under-60 crowd cheaper. Following the theory that older=sicker (in a broad actuarial sense), cutting these older people from the regular insurance rolls will help drive down costs for everyone. And, it's an easy solution -- no five-hundred-page legal tomes are required to explain this plan. There could be no questions about how or whether the program will work; it already does.

As a side note, it'd be nice if Medicare could bargain with drug companies for lower drug prices. But that's a question for another time....

Let Me Sum Up: Virginia, Kitten, Matrix, GenCon

2009-08-23T22:11:00.003-04:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks. Laura and I spent a week in the Washington, DC area visiting her family, and I spent the next week working 40 hours plus attending all four days of GenCon. So now that I've got a minute to sit down at a keyboard, let me sum up:

It's always nice getting a chance to spend time with Laura's family. We took a side trip to visit her brother Gary, and that was a blast; I like him and his family. We also made a lunch date with Laura's old friend Bruce, and I'm always happy when we can get together with him. The real adventure of the trip was that we had to take a kitten with us; we've recently acquired a fifth indoor cat (you may commence with the Crazy Cat People jokes), and she's been sick for most of the time she's been in. She barely survived a fight with an opossum, so we took her in and rescued her from Certain Doom, and took her to the vet for repairs and a tune-up. One of her wounds had gotten infected, so she had a huge abscess on her chest; she went to the vet the day before we left and had kitty surgery, and the vet put a drain in her chest. We couldn't leave her unattended here, and we would've felt bad dumping her on any of our friends, so we took her with, where I could engage in the wound care regimen and give her antibiotics. Traveling with a cat -- especially a sick kitten -- takes a lot more energy and planning than a normal trip. But it was a fun trip, and the kitten is excruciatingly cute.

Of the fun, we rented a Toyota Matrix for the drive. We really liked this car. It might be even better than our previous favorite, a Toyota Rav4. Its fuel economy was impressive (it's rated 32 mpg on the highway, but our number was closer to 35), it was smooth and quiet and comfortable to ride in, and it was surprisingly roomy. The seats were nice, the stereo was good, and it was well-designed in lots of little ways. We originally picked up a Dodge Caliber, which we were happy with when we got it; then it developed a mechanical problem, and we had to trade it for the Matrix, which is a similar vehicle. And the Matrix was a step up in every way. Plus, they're cheaper. Seriously, the Caliber should come with a factory-installed bumper sticker that says, "I didn't do my research!"

GenCon was a lot of fun, too. Laura got me a four-day pass for my birthday, and I spent pretty much all of my non-working time at the 'con. Along with the games, GenCon also features a writer's conference, and that's where I spent my time. This year's guest writers included Jean Rabe, Pat Rothfuss, Anton Strout, Richard Lee Byers, Paul Genesse, Elizabeth Vaughan, and a dozen or so others. They offered seminars on world building in speculative fiction, on selling your novel to a publisher, on a pile of different subgenres, about the mechanics of writing. I enjoyed all of them. And, I've gotta say: if you get a chance to see Pat Rothfuss on a panel, I highly recommend it; he's an interesting guy and a good speaker. And, he and I share the tendency to answer a question with a story. I've always wondered if it was amusing or annoying for the people around me. If I do it anywhere near as well as Pat Rothfuss, it's amusing....

I'm not entirely sure the gaming crowd is still my crowd. I walk through the show floor at GenCon every year, and it's becoming increasingly apparent that I'm out of the loop on a lot of this stuff. I've never played a collectible card game; I've never LARP'ed; I haven't played a real Dungeons and Dragons campaign for almost twenty years. I'm even years behind on my video gaming; I've never played MMORPGs, or online multiplayer games, or even Counterstrike. On the plus side, I'm probably close to the median age at GenCon; there are a lot of folks older than I am, who are still playing tabletop games and still painting miniature battlemechs. Still, whether it's my crowd anymore or not, I still have a blast wandering around and seeing what's new.

So, that's been my life for the last few weeks. Now I'm trying to settle into a regular routine that includes writing....

Yet another cute thing Laura does

2009-08-02T20:18:00.002-04:00

My wife has designed lights for a huge number of shows, set to a wide variety of music. So there's a lot of music which she associates with a show she's lit. So, every so often, she'll be listening to the radio, singing along under her breath with a song, and suddenly the lyrics turn into production notes. Today, a Beatles song came on the radio, and the lyrics she sang looked something like:

"Get back, get back lights GO, get back to where you once belonged."

She does this with classical music, too; it sounds something like:

"hmm hmmmm, dim da de dumm scrim out, lights go, hmm da de de dummm...."

I'm not entirely sure she realizes she's doing this, which makes it even cuter.

The Working-too-much Saga

2009-07-29T21:58:00.003-04:00

To help with my GenCon Writer's Seminar planning, I made a list of the twelve seminars I most wanted to attend. Then I realized that I would miss nine of the twelve because I'm working. I also realized that I'm only available for two of the seminars with the guest of honor, Pat Rothfuss. I'm more than a bit grouchy about this.

For one thing, the Artsgarden is supposed to be shut down for the first two weeks of August -- no performances, no events. This conveniently (and, believe it or not, completely coincidentally) means I've usually got a flexible schedule for GenCon. But this year we've got eight shows in those two weeks, and we've got one every day of GenCon. So no shut-down time, and no free days for GenCon.

This is compounded by the fact that, right after my part-time tech guy quit in March, we got our budget cut. The easiest way to trim is to leave open positions vacant, so his job was eliminated. We also lost a part-time person at the info desk whose position was then eliminated, so I'm covering a lot of that time, too. I'm on salary, so I don't get paid extra for the extra 10 or 20 hours I work in a week. I also don't get days off; if there's a performance or event, I need to be there for it. There's no one else to cover. So I'm expected to be at the Artsgarden for all of the 400-ish performances and events we do in a year. There's just no way for me to have a fair schedule with that work load. Working seven days a week some weeks, even if one or two of them are short days, is just too much.

Honestly, I'd be better with the schedule if I were actually compensated for the extra work I do. I'm on salary, so the concept of overtime pay doesn't apply to me. I'm not sure from which philosophical framework I should approach this. If I work 60 hours in a week, I could view it as working for 2/3 of my standard rate, which drops my hourly rate down to just a few dollars more than minimum wage. Or, I could view it as working 40 hours for my standard wage, then volunteering for the next 20 hours. This option somehow feels better to me; I'd rather think of myself as volunteering than working for cheap.

A restaurant manager recently told me about their overtime pay: they get half time for overtime. If you're on straight time and you work 60 hours, you get paid for 60. If you get time and a half for hours over 40, 60 hours of work will earn you 70 hours of pay. They get half time for hours over 40, so if they work 60 hours, they get paid for 50. They're getting paid for less than the time they work, but for me even this would be a huge improvement.

The other hammer-blow with my schedule is that it cuts seriously into my writing time. When I have to work an extra 15 hours in a week, that time doesn't (ideally) come from my sleeping/showering/eating time, or my mandatory home/yard-maintenance time, or my spouse time -- it comes from that elusive, tiny chunk of "free time" I get in a week. This is the time pool from which my writing time and my reading time comes. And chopping 15 hours out of the Free Time pie leaves me with an impractically small amount of writing time. I've read an average of only two books a month since my schedule exploded, which is contributing to my surliness. And about half the time, I don't even get to write my daily 30-minute writing exercise, which is the absolute bare minimum for anyone who wants to write. And, even on some days when I've got a little time, it's not unusual for me to be too mentally or physically wiped out to use it; I just want to take a nap.

It's been over four months now, and my schedule is really starting to wear me down. I'd love to go back to my previously-mandated 40-hours-per-week limit. I sometimes worked more (occasionally, much much more -- my record was over 100 hours in a week, for which I was paid for 40), but it was comforting to know that my norm was a standard 40-hour work week. Now, my norm is whatever the schedule demands, which is a bare minimum of five days a week, more typically six or seven, with at least one day over 12 hours. If we were living in a different economy, I'd be job-hunting; I'd even take something that paid less, if it meant a less punishing schedule.

And, it occurs to me that I'm already working for less. By working 50 hours for 40 hours of pay, I'm essentially working for 80% of my normal rate. If I work 60 hours in a week, I'm down to 2/3 of my usual rate. If I could find a job that actually paid overtime, I could take a job that paid significantly less than my theoretical hourly rate now, work the same number of hours I do now, and come out ahead....

Okay, done venting and whining now. Back to the grindstone.

Gen Con Writing Seminars, in Google Calendar Form

2009-07-29T19:18:00.003-04:00

I'm very psyched to be attending GenCon this year. Before last year, I only went for one day; I wandered the show floor and people-watched and hung out with friends and generally had a good time. Last year, I attended all four days, mostly so I could go to the writing seminars and workshops. They were good for me (and hopefully my writing) in a number of ways, and I'm looking forward to going again this year. I made a Google Calendar with all of the writing seminars and workshops; I pasted it in below. Most of the time, there are two different seminars or workshops at the same time, so I'll need to decide which of the two I'd rather attend. Some of them are tough choices....

Here's the link to the calendar,

Here's the actual calendar:

The bane of sociologists

2009-07-28T19:36:00.002-04:00

I wonder if sociologists are irritated that the word meme is rapidly losing all academic meaning, and instead means stupid internet-transmitted quiz. The study of memes was serious business for a while; now, it primarily means "What variety of potato are you?" or "Which famous bridge are you?". If I were an academic sociologist, I know this would get under my skin, just a wee bit.

A yam, and the Brooklyn Bridge, by the way.

Rope Access: the safety factor

2009-07-25T11:31:00.000-04:00

In my wild rock-climbing youth, I did what we called "speed rappelling". We'd put on a harness and pre-rig a descender, then run up to an edge, attach the rope to something as quickly as possible, and race to the bottom. A typical time frame would be five or ten minutes to check rope, harness up, rig the descender, and double-check; twenty seconds to tie on, drop rope, and clear the edge, or five seconds to clip on (depending on where we were); and about eight seconds for a hundred-foot drop. The goal was to tie on and get down, fast. The pre-rigging could take as much time as needed, but once you ran for the edge, it was all about speed.

Rope-access work is in extreme contrast to that. From the time I decide to head up, I've got over half an hour to collect and inspect gear and bag it for transport. Then, twenty minutes to harness up and get me and my gear to the top. Then, depending on where I need to work, I'll spend somewhere between twenty minutes and an hour doing the top-rigging to set and check my safety line, working line, and positioning line. The actual repair takes five or ten minutes at most. If I need to do another repair that's not near the first one, I'll probably need to redo the top rigging to reach a different area. When I'm done for the day, it's another half hour to strike my top rigging and get down, and another twenty minutes to check gear and put everything away.

The time difference here is the safety factor. Speed rappelling is fairly safe, really; you double-check your rigging before you start, and you make sure you have a solid anchor point before you start. The only danger moment comes from potentially screwing up your anchor rigging; there's a chance that, in a hurry, you could screw up you knotwork or anchor in a sloppy, unstable way, with dire consequences. Rope access work, on the other hand, is 100% safe. Everything is checked and double checked, and everything is redundant. You don't do anything risky, ever. Your gear is fail-proof, and your skill set is absolute. You're slow, and careful, and methodical, and there are no surprises. Nothing under your control will go wrong, and almost everything is under your control. I could take about a third of the time, and use about a third of the gear, and still be 99% safe. But that extra 1% is important. It's what separates daredevil kids from professionals.

Case in point: a few weeks ago I went up to patch a leak. It was overcast, but not expected to rain. But the weather changed its mind in the two hours it took me to get ready, get up, and get working. I noticed it was suddenly dark and looking like rain, so I hit top and started striking my gear. I had just finished packing the last of it when the rain started, and hard. This had danger potential; I was on top of a big glass-and-steel domed structure -- nearly frictionless when wet -- and I had already struck my safety line. If I were at the rock-climbing level of safety paranoia, this would be that 1% hazard zone. But, I'm at the rope-access level of safety paranoia. So I have ladder hooks. At the rock-climbing level of paranoia, I would just climb a ladder. At the rope-access level of paranoia, I use safety gear to climb and descend a ladder, and to get to the ladder from the top anchors. At no point was I ever unsecured. So even if I lost my footing on the wet glass dome or the steel ladder, I still wouldn't have taken a real fall. And even if I lost my footing, all my gear is attached to me; none of it is going to fall and land in the street. I made it down without incident, and never had to put my gear to the test. But incidents like this are the reason for all that extra weight and time and gear. Otherwise, that 1% will eventually catch up with you....

Cabaret: Nina Simone tribute

2009-07-23T20:50:00.002-04:00

This weekend, the Cabaret at the Connoisseur Room features Pauline Jean, in town from New York to perform her Nina Simone tribute show. I'm psyched about the performance; not only was I impressed with the Pauline Jean clips I caught on YouTube, I can't say enough about the reinvented Cabaret. It's everything a cabaret should be: the atmosphere is perfect, the bar is everything you need, the menu is light and snacky. It's an intimate space, with no bad seats in the entire house. They do real cabaret-style shows, which is nothing like the ACT I worked for fifteen years ago. And, it's well managed, which is also a radical departure; in the Claude days, I often got the feeling I should be wearing a wire when I talked to the people in charge....

But that's a long set of sordid stories, none of which apply to the new Cabaret. I'm happy to be moonlighting for them, and I'm impressed with their professionalism, their style, and the extremely high quality of their performances. So if you're free and feeling like a good show, check it out this weekend!

Rope Access: the tool comparison

2009-07-23T18:33:00.002-04:00

In the name of comedy, two pictures. First, this is the collection of tools I need to repair the leaks in the Artsgarden dome:

And, this is the collection of tools I need to get to where I need to do the repairs:

None of this is optional; I'll use every piece of this before I'm done. The total weight is close to fifty pounds, not counting the tools in the first picture. And, this isn't a complete picture. I'm missing my suction cups, the kind glass installers use. And, for some places on the dome, I'll need an extra rope. The orange one is the safety line, the red dynamic line is my working line, and I'll need an extra positioning line for about a quarter of the repairs. That is, the orange one will (theoretically) never hold any weight. The red one holds me up, and the third rope will pull me sideways into position.

Because crack is still illegal

2009-07-22T12:32:00.002-04:00

The law is keeping me from picking up an addiction to crack or heroin. But the police are strangely silent on the subject of flash-based in-browser games, even though they're possibly more addictive than hard drugs. You can only shoot so much smack in a day, but you can easily sink 24 consecutive hours into a game.

So, in the interest of doing y'all a huge, huge disservice, here are links to a few highly addictive games. First, Learn to Fly, a game in which you get a penguin airborne. My deep advice: those little dots for air resistance and ramp height are skills you can buy, not score markers. Second,Crush the Castle, in which you use a trebuchet to demolish medieval structures. Much fun, and fun to re-play earlier castles once you acquire heavy armaments. These two games are nice and simple; you can replay them, but you can also finish either one in an hour or so. The third game,Gemcraft, is much, much more addictive, and also takes a lot longer to play. It's possible to sink days into it, I suspect, though I put it down before I got too hooked. For a writer, one of the real perks of a netbook might be that the in-browser game window for all these is too large to fit the screen of my wife's HP Mini, and you've therefore got one less possible distraction. I don't have any games installed on my old writing laptop, both because it's too old and underpowered, and because I know that the games are distracting, but it'll run any in-browser game without a problem....

Writer's Block

2009-07-21T19:55:00.002-04:00

I've been having a bit of trouble with the novel for the past few weeks. No, scratch that -- I've been having an enormous, crushing amount of trouble. I've hit a point where I know what just happened, I know what happens in two more chapters, but I have no idea how to get from here to there. I've written the next chapter six or seven times, six or seven different ways, but none of them work. I'm still hammering on that, but in the meantime, I just decided to skip ahead a few chapters and keep writing from where I can grasp the story again.

It's odd, but when I can't write, I also don't blog. Whenever I try, I feel like I should be doing Actual Writing instead, so I skip the blogging to continue my not-writing. But I'm back at the writing, and also back at the blogging.

It occurs to me, the lack of blogging was the first sign that I was seriously stuck on the novel. By the time I realized the Doom Of Writers had settled into my head, I had already gone blogging-free for three or four days. This might make a good mental barometer for me.

A short vacation!

2009-07-05T12:13:00.002-04:00

Laura and I have an entire weekend off together! Woo hoo! So, in celebration,we've decided to spend the weekend doing absolutely nothing! Woo hoo!

Okay, not absolutely nothing. We're cooking yummy meals, and we're cleaning the house a bit, and we're reading, and we're napping. But other than that, no real plans of any kind. We've each finished a book, and I've made breakfast both days, and she's made dinner. It rained all day yesterday, but the weather didn't stop our neighbors from the usual Independence Day displays with big airburst fireworks and the traditional celebratory small-arms fire. Our neighbors just down the street put on an impressive fireworks show, with a few hours of mortar-launched fireworks. Maybe the highlight of the show was when a police car came roaring down the street; he was going too fast to see the mortar launcher (basically, a 16" piece of iron pipe welded to a steel base, with a cinder block as ballast) in the middle of the street, or at least to avoid it. It sounded like it did some damage to his undercarriage. He stopped and got out of the car (Laura: "oops! Now we get to see some real fireworks!"), checked for damage, then took off again. We complain often about the police not actually enforcing the law in our neighborhood, but I'm glad they're ignoring the fireworks laws. That is, I'd be irritated if they don't send a car for gunshots or wild dogs, but stopped people from holding private fireworks displays....

Gotta mention, we spent last night on the porch in fleece jackets. In early July. Weird.

A sign that I have no taste

2009-06-30T11:04:00.002-04:00

After I finished my bagel this morning, I noticed there were several bite-size pieces of my napkin missing. Assuming the teeth marks are mine, I probably ate 10% of my napkin without realizing it. In my defense, I was seriously multitasking while I ate; the eating was to ward off hunger, not for the pleasure of enjoying good food. So, given that taste is obviously irrelevant to my multitasking eating, I think this means I can eat the cheapest possible food while I'm working. I mean, why spend extra on better food, when I'm paying so little attention to it that I can eat paper and not realize it? Maybe I could even eat the cardboard prop bagel with the spray-foam cream cheese -- the one that's been in the countertop display for the last month -- without noticing. Though, now that I think of it, the prop bagel is probably more expensive than a real bagel. But also probably more filling....

The Humongous Mecha Theory of Foreign Policy

2009-06-29T21:49:00.002-04:00

While listening to people discuss the possible use of US military power to somehow solve the electoral crisis in Iran, I invented a new guideline for military force. I call it the Humongous Mecha Theory of Foreign Policy. It's generally acknowledged that the US has the best-equipped, best-trained army on the planet. We've got an unstoppable naval fleet, with dozens of ships that can flatten any coastal or near-coastal city and, via cruise missles or aircraft, even strike targets a thousand miles inland. I mean, really -- picture that. We can park a missile carrier off the coast of New York City, and it can drop ordnance on a specific house in Houston, Texas. We've got aircraft that can outrun bullets. We've got tanks that can accurately hit enemy tanks six miles away. Our technology and training are the best in the world.

Everybody (that is, everybody who plays Mechwarrior or watches Manga) is familiar with a variety of Humongous Mecha: giant mechanized war machines that walk on two huge mechanical legs, armored like tanks and bristling with an array of advanced weaponry and military electronics. They can lay down enormous firepower over long distances and soak amazing amounts of damage; they're the ultimate battlefield weapon of the future. Now, for any potential military engagement, picture that you've got an enormous army of Humongous Mecha. Will they help the situation? If you're fighting a front-line battle against soldiers and tanks and helicopters, yeah! They're the war machine of the future! If your goal is to Blow Stuff Up and Sow Carnage, bring on the MadCats! If your intention is Shock And Awe, go for it!

On the other hand, if your objective is political or social, giant war machines are probably a bad option. They're not the right tool for quelling civil unrest; they're not good for winning hearts and minds. And they're inappropriate for securing voting rights, unless you need to blast some voter suppression attack helicopters.

Thus, the Humongous Mecha Theory of Foreign Policy: if you wouldn't use Humongous Mecha, you probably shouldn't use the US military, either. We've got incredible armed forces. But they're not the right tool for every job. I think our political leaders and pundit class fall too easily under Maslow's Hammer: if all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. We spend more on our military than every other country in the world, combined. It'd be silly to do that and never actually use the resulting armed forces. But we never think of spending a non-ridiculous amount on the military; rather, we justify our expenses by looking for places to fight. Plus, it's hard to wield diplomatic or economic pressure well, but Blowing Things Up is fairly straightforward. Not necessarily easy, not necessarily useful, but straightforward.

Botox math

2009-06-28T21:12:00.003-04:00

I thought I'd share some numbers about Botox. First, botulinum toxin is the most toxic naturally-occurring protein known. Lethal dosage for humans is roughly 1 nanogram per kilogram of body weight; by contrast, the lethal dosage for potassium cyanide is roughly 8 million nanograms per kilogram. A therapeutic Unit of Botox is defined as the average lethal dose for a mouse, or roughly 50 picograms (that's trillionths of a gram). A typical dosage is 5U per .1 ml. And a typical procedure may involve 60 Units (25 for frown lines, 20 for crow's feet, and 15 for the forehead). Doctor's cost for a Unit is roughly $10 to $15. Doctors perform roughly 4,600,000 Botox procedures a year. So, math:

Raw botulinum toxin costs $200 billion per gram.

Doctors use a total of almost 1500 gallons of diluted Botox a year. Dissolved in this 1500 gallons is .013 grams of raw botulinum toxin, roughly the mass of half a grain of rice.

This would be a lethal dose for over 160,000 175-pound people.

Did I mention I do math when I'm bored?

We have a Cabaret again!

2009-06-26T22:37:00.003-04:00

Years ago, I worked for the American Cabaret Theatre. It was horrific, in ways it's probably not wise or legal to talk about even now. Back in those days, they did big not-very-original original musical-revue theater with some very good performers under some truly horrible management. My last gig with them was on New Year's Eve 1995, and I swore I'd never work for them again. They couldn't afford me, by definition; if they had called and wanted me to work, and they actually agreed to the outrageous fee I named, I would've raised the fee until they couldn't afford it, or until I couldn't afford to turn it down.

Since then, the American Cabaret Theatre has been through two changes of management and a change of venue. And, most importantly, a change of style. They're now The Cabaret, and they're doing actual cabaret-style shows: a cabaret singer, a small band, a small stage, an intimate space, subdued lighting, a well-stocked bar. It's now co-managed by Shannon Forsell, who I worked with in the ACT days; she's one of my favorite singers in town, and she's working hard to turn the Cabaret around, to reinvent it as a true cabaret-style company. So I did a show for them tonight, and it was great. Brenda Williams -- another of my favorite singers -- did two sets, just under two hours of music, and she was everything a cabaret singer should be. And the venue, the Connoisseur Room, is as close to a perfect venue for this kind of performance as you'll find anywhere.

So, in short: if cabaret shows interest you, Indy now has an actual cabaret! In every important aspect, it's no longer the American Cabaret Theatre we knew and abhorred. It's a new creation, and they do wonderful shows in the perfect setting. Shannon and Trina are doing something great downtown, bringing something new and cool to the city, so go see their shows and support them.

And, might I suggest, it's an ideal activity for a date: dim lighting, romantic atmosphere, good music, snacky food....

Today's Schadenfreude

2009-06-21T13:45:00.002-04:00

One of the biggest low-grade irritations in people's lives are people who believe The Rules don't apply to them. Society works because people generally follow The Rules: we're generally nice to strangers, we follow traffic laws, we wait our turn in lines. But, a lot of the rules are enforced only socially. So if you're sociopathic enough, you can break them and come out ahead more often than not. Some kinds of sociopath get in the habit of believing that rules in general don't apply to them. But some rules are enforced by a higher standard than social norms -- they're enforced by physics. And if you habitually assume the rules don't apply to you, you may not stop to differentiate which rules are social and which are physics.

I mention this because I watched a guy in a conversion van pull into a parking garage today as I was biking in to work. The hanging bar that says "CLEARANCE: 6'6" " bumped over the top of his van, but this was apparently one of those rules that didn't apply to him. He also didn't believe the sign that said "SPEED LIMIT ON RAMP: 10 MPH" applied to him either. Combine these, and picture what happened when he hit the pinch point at the bottom of the ramp. I really wish I would've taken a picture....

Indy by bike: Dorman Street

2009-06-19T19:31:00.000-04:00

Indianapolis is full of fun little nooks where cars can't go. When I next travel them, I'll take some pictures so you non-cyclists can see what you're missing. For now, here's one I drive through every few days on my way home. Just north of Michigan Street, Dorman Street used to be a throughway (as shown on the old Google Maps picture here). It's since turned into a cul-de-sac, with a footbridge spanning the creek. It's a nice, quiet spot in a decent neighborhood, and the property owner hasn't seemed to mind if I hop off the bike and read for a while near the end of the bridge. A picture (click on them for the full-size version on my Flickr page):

Tired.

2009-06-12T17:31:00.003-04:00

I've got a quadruple-shot latte sitting on the desk in front of me. I wasn't really planning on four shots of espresso; I just ordered a large latte with an extra shot, and I didn't realize that a large already has three in it. But it's a happy accident, because I'm going to need the caffeine to stay awake until I'm done with work. I've had a bunch of late nights this week, and I've been sleeping poorly. It's partially scheduling -- I've been busy, and at odd hours, and it's messing with my sleep schedule. We had houseguests last night, which kept me up late and woke me early. We had a serious storm Wednesday night, and the thunder kept waking me in the middle of the night. And Tuesday, I worked from 10am to 2:30am, followed by a late-night run to Waffle House. Tonight, I'm done at 9, at which time I go home and collapse into bed for (hopefully) ten hours of (ideally) uninterrupted sleep.

The incomplete novel is also partially to blame for my poor sleep; right before I drift off to sleep, my brain will lock onto some odd writing problem I'm having and thrash it around for a few hours instead of letting me sleep. It's not obviously productive time; I don't finish a late-night insomniac brainstorming session with problems solved (or, at least not consciously solved). The irony isn't lost on me that after a sleepless night, I'm generally too tired to write much the next day....

Yet another thing I love about my wife

2009-06-10T12:56:00.003-04:00

I worked a long day yesterday; since the departure of my part-time assistant (and the budget-cutting decision to not replace him), I've had a few of these, since I'm now expected to cover every performance and event myself. Yesterday I was at work at 10:30am for a performance, and was there until our second function of the day ended, around 2:30am. Laura called on the way home and asked when I'd be home, and I told her I was too wired from working to go to bed right away, so I was going to do some grocery shopping on the way home. She said that she had just finished a book, and also wouldn't be able to sleep for a while, so I stopped at home and picked her up so we could spend some time together. We did our shopping, then went to Waffle House (the only restaurant on our side of town that's still open at 3am) and had breakfast/dinner and talked until 4:30am, at which point we went home and napped before having to be awake this morning. We're a bit sleepy today, but it's worth it; I'm glad we got to spend some time together, and I'm glad we got to unwind after our long workdays by sitting in an otherwise-empty diner and talking over coffee.

We don't do this often, but I'm glad she's up for an occasional late-night, low-key adventure....

Shrinking the Bookstore

2009-06-09T14:22:00.003-04:00

American consumers tend to develop an internal Bullshit Detector. It's a bit like a Geiger counter, ticking an alert in the presence of marketing hooey. My detector was set wildly clacking away this afternoon when I visited Borders Books downtown. They're rearranging the first floor and adding a few comfy couches -- and losing, I estimate, over two hundred feet of shelf space in the process. What got me was the signage: "In Order To Serve You Better...". There were other words after these first six, but I couldn't concentrate on them over the staccato sounds of my Bullshit Detector on high alert. Because I can just imagine all the ways in which cutting their stock by over a thousand volumes in my preferred genre is Serving Me Better. Not to mention all the ways in which radically reduced shelf space will Serve my eventual writing career Better.

And, a sign that they're not Serving Me Better: I was looking for two books, neither of which is particularly obscure, and they didn't have either on the shelf. I'm looking forward to hearing Borders officers complain about lagging sales, with confused expressions on corporate leaders' faces, unable to understand why people are buying fewer books. Maybe they'll try to blame The Economy, or The Internet....

Gruel & Porridge

2009-06-09T10:59:00.002-04:00

Some of my favorite breakfast and snack foods are of the Porridge Family: cream of wheat, oatmeal, grits, and the like. They're yummy, quick to prepare, and easy to clean up. They taste the same whether you make them in the microwave or on the stovetop. And they're a socially-acceptable vehicle for consuming brown sugar. Laura, on the other hand, is skeeved out by the porridge group. Not only doesn't she eat them, it even bothers her a little watching me eat them. It's mostly a consistency thing; the vaguely gloppy, slimy texture messes with her sense of order.

This isn't a problem I suffer from; the texture of my food doesn't bother me at all. Case in point: when Laura was working late last week, I conducted a grits experiment. They're better when they're a bit lumpy, so I reasoned that maybe they'd be good if you spread them thickly on waxed paper, let them dry a bit, and cut them into bars, which you could then eat with butter and brown sugar. (You see the lengths to which I'll go, to procrastinate working on the novel.) The grits experiment was extremely Not Good. But the point is, I did the experiment. I didn't mention this to Laura; just the thought of it would probably induce retching....

Grease and Dough

2009-06-07T16:17:00.002-04:00

I have an idea for a restaurant. I don't want to start it myself, but I wish someone else would; it fills a need, unlike most new restaurants, and I could see it being wildly popular. The name of the restaurant: Fair Food. The entire menu would consist of food normally only found at county fairs and church festivals: funnel cakes, elephant ears, lemon shake-ups, corn dogs, sno-cones, cotton candy, and the like. As far as I know, there is no restaurant in Indy, or anywhere else, that serves this kind of food. Sure, you can occasionally find a single menu item of fair food at some restaurants (the Ram Brewery downtown has funnel cakes on their dessert menu), and you'll see sno-cone stands sometimes in the summer. But I don't know of a year-round, one-stop shop for midway food, and I think the world needs such a restaurant.

I suspect this kind of place would make a fortune; if you charged fair prices -- that is, not equitable prices, but the prices you pay at the county fair -- your profit margin would be enormous. And your capital outlay to start such a restaurant would be relatively minimal; almost everything would be cooked in the same vat of hot grease. And, in county-fair tradition, you'd only change your grease once a season.

I'm thinking about this right now, because I really want an elephant ear, and maybe some rib meat on a bun....

Buckets of blood products!

2009-05-29T13:23:00.002-04:00

I donated platelets this morning at the Indiana Blood Center, and when I finished they informed me that I had just donated my fifteenth gallon of blood products, spread over the last twenty years or so. One pint at a time, that's 120 donations. That equals three five-gallon buckets full to the brim, or 160 12-ounce soda cans full of blood and platelets. I'm still far from my grandfather's record of over fifty gallons, but I'm working on it.

In honor of my 384 five-ounce wine glasses of bodily fluids, here's my favorite piece of blood trivia:

Somewhere between 9% and 11% of your body weight is blood. Blood weighs, roughly, 8.5 pounds per gallon. And you can lose as much as a third of your blood at once, and as much as half over a longer period of time, before you're at risk of exsanguination (bleeding to death). So, if you weigh 170 pounds, roughly 17 pounds of that is blood. 17 pounds is two gallons. So, you'd need to lose over 10 cups of blood before you need to worry about bleeding to death. Remember this the next time you see someone cut themselves and complain about bleeding to death. Then remind them that our hypothetical 170-pound person would have to bleed a puddle 1/16" deep and close to five feet across before they need to worry about dying of blood loss....

My Job Is Getting Under My Skin

2009-05-28T17:14:00.000-04:00

....literally. I think I'm a little allergic to the trees in the Artsgarden. Every time I have to work with the trees, I end up itchy and blotchy. And I think it's getting worse the more I'm exposed. I just pulled the can lights out of one tree, and I'm already debating leaving early so I can go home and hop in the shower, and maybe burn my clothes....

The trees aren't going away, so all of the coping will be on my end. Maybe I'll just keep some benadryl handy, and pop a pill or two when I know I'm about to play with the greenery.

Going Tactical

2009-05-24T20:57:00.001-04:00

I know I just said I'm officially too old to be interested in speed rappelling. But I just found a sign that I'm not that old yet. About half of the gear I'm looking at comes in tactical black: the rope, the harness, the ascenders and descender, and some of the carabiners. I know I have absolutely no practical use for all-black gear. But the price is the same, and it's kinda tempting. It's all black! It's Tactical! It's just like being a Navy SEAL! Hoo-AH! I have the opportunity to experience all the thrills of using Tactical Gear!

And, reading that back, I'm realizing that maybe I am that old, if all-black gear is all it takes to add excitement to my life....

Monkeying around

2009-05-24T19:11:00.003-04:00

I'm shopping around for some rigging and safety gear for work, because I've got a complicated, necessary repair job that requires climbing around on the outside of the Big Glass Dome. There's no way to access it from the ground, and renting a boom lift big enough to reach the top from the ground is prohibitively expensive. So I'm doing it the hard way, by climbing.

And, oddly, climbing isn't really the hard way. There's ladder access to the top, and it's easier to climb back up then rappel down to a new location, than it is to reposition a lift on the ground. And, I can reach anywhere by rope. With a lift, geometry isn't in our favor; a lift that can reach 90' straight up isn't hard to come by, but one that will reach up and over to the top of a 90' dome is a rarity. Not only that, but a boom lift will put you in a bad position to do the work -- it'll put you right above the work area, with the floor of the lift between you and your target. And a lift has blind spots. There are corners and curves where a lift won't reach.

I'm also convinced that climbing is a lot safer. With rope access work, I'm depending on a lot of analog gear, gear with a failure rate of literally zero when used correctly. I'm not dependent on complex mechanical anything; there are no motors to fail, no controls to stick. And the safety gear is absolute. For a safety-conscious, knowledgeable user, rope access is as close to foolproof as possible.

And, relatively speaking, the new gear isn't that expensive. For a complete kit -- harness, rope, ascenders, descender, helmet, fall protection, and assorted doodads -- I'm spending less than it would cost to get a permit to close down a lane of Illinois Street to position a lift for a week. The new gear is a sign that I'm taking the safety issues seriously. I already own my personal collection of good rock-climbing gear, which is adequate to do pretty much everything I would need to do. But it's not failsafe and, significantly, not OSHA-approved for rope access. So some new gear is definitely a wise choice. I'm officially too old to make wild whooping noises while speed-rappelling down buildings; I'm all about the slow and extremely safe these days.

And, I get to go shopping! For tools! Woo hoo!

That's me, informative guy.

2009-05-20T19:04:00.003-04:00

We recently lost a staff person at the Artsgarden info desk, and as part of the universal belt-tightening that's everywhere these days, we're not replacing her. So I'm spending a lot more time than usual at the information desk. I answer questions, give directions, and help tourists get to know the city. And I generally have a good time with it.

We've got a running joke that if we had an arrow on a stick, we could use it to answer about half of our questions, from "where's the closest restroom?" to "which way is TJ Maxx?". But the other half of the questions are fun. One of the biggies is, "what can we do in town tonight?", and people are universally impressed with the answers. Indy has a lot happening, and I like directing people to the live music and dancing and theatre and art galleries that Indy has to offer. I like selling people on our arts and cultural scene. I like telling people about the good non-chain restaurants downtown. I like talking about the free performances we host here in the Artsgarden. Indy is a great city, and I enjoy being able to talk up our good points for visitors.

My evenings at the info desk keep me informed about what's new in town, too. I start the shift by looking up all the live music in town and checking the performance schedules for shows. And, after having done this for a while, I've gotten to know a lot about downtown -- what's where, when it's open, how much it costs. I know where all the drugstores are and when they're open, I know where to buy a shirt with a picture of Monument Circle. And I know the closest Starbucks is in the Hyatt, though I'm always happy to tell people they should go to the South Bend Chocolate Company instead; the coffee's better, they've got killer hot chocolate and good ice cream, and you'll never have a better mocha.

And I like sounding knowledgeable -- it's practically a hobby. The first time someone asks me a question, I generally have to do some digging for an answer. But, the second or third time someone asks me an obscure question, I sound like a genius. I got to do this over the weekend; for some reason, I had a lot of people asking me about comedy clubs. The first guy who asked sent me to the internet for answers. But the third through fifth guys were extremely impressed when I knew who was playing where, all the showtimes, and all the prices, off the top of my head. One group said I was like the information desk guy in Airplane!, which is a funny and flattering comparison. No questions about cheetahs or orgasms yet, though....

On Set!

2009-05-16T20:17:00.001-04:00

Today: more teevee commercial, this time on location in White River State Park. I really like this kind of work. I'm normally a one-man show; I do all the everything technical by myself. So I enjoy a chance to be part of a team of experts. And, a film crew is a team of experts whose jobs I couldn't do. When I load in a set at a theater, I'm part of a big crew, but I'm an interchangeable part. I could easily step into any position on the crew, from carpenter to rigger to audio to lighting. But a film crew is packed with specialized jobs that are outside my area of expertise. So it's always educational; every time I do this kind of work, I walk away knowing more than when I started.

It's also rare, and nice, for me to be a part of such an efficient machine. Everybody has their job, and everybody is aware that everybody else is an expert at what they do. There's no second-guessing, nobody peeking over your shoulder. You just do what you're good at. The trade-off is that you have to be competent and you have to pay attention; everyone's expecting it from you, and nobody's looking over your shoulder to make sure you're doing what you should be. I hustle and work hard on this kind of call, because I don't want my part of the machine to be the one making the grinding noises.

Also, video pays well. I worked two short-ish days (actually very long days, but only because I coupled the video work with full workdays at my real job), and got paid enough that even after taxes I could afford a low-end netbook. I'm not buying one, of course; I'm paying off part of last year's tax debt. Still, the money's good, even if it doesn't get to go directly to the Shiny Tech Toy fund....

Not cycling to work

2009-05-15T20:55:00.000-04:00

Today is Bike to Work Day in Indianapolis. And I didn't bike to work. I'm not being iconoclastic or engaging in any sort of rebellion here; I had to be downtown at 6am, and I won't be leaving downtown until 9:30 or so. I picked up some extremely last-minute work programming lights for a teevee commercial, and I head straight from the shooting location to my real job. The Pedal-and-Park doesn't open until after I'd need to park, and it closes four hours before I'd need to claim my bike. On the other hand, I got to experience BtWD vicariously; a hundred cyclists biked through our set this morning, on the corner of Mass Ave and Vermont. Most of them were friendly, and only a few were actively surly.

Speaking of cycling things: the city recently added bike lanes on a few major streets. I think I speak for all cyclists when I say that we really appreciate the effort. And I think I speak for the majority when I say that I hope they get it right next time; they didn't this time. One of the added bike lanes was on New York Street, and in a five-block stretch of downtown, the traffic lane and the bike lane crisscross six times. It's an active hazard to navigate, much worse than cycling in normal traffic with no bike lanes. And, now that there's a marked bike lane, we're expected to use the unsafe bike lane; we can no longer ride where it's convenient and safe, we're stuck in the Zigzag-o'-Doom. I ride two blocks out of my way so I can ride on a street with no bike lanes. I've got better chances there.

The design of the new bike lane on New York is bad enough that it almost suggests malice; I can't imagine anyone planning that monstrosity without seeing the dangers. In my more cynical moments I almost wonder if it wasn't some sort of punishment for the cycling community, a payback for us complaining about the lack of bike lanes. At least it's asphalt, though. The obvious non-cyclist who designed the Cultural Trail decided that paving stones were an ideal cycling surface. I can't wait to see what it looks like after a few winters....

Body Fondue: a (naughty) public service announcement

2009-05-11T17:08:00.001-04:00

An R-Rated blog post -- if you're easily offended or too young, read no further. You've been warned!

I suspect most couples have experimented with edibles. From the moment Mickey Rourke broke out the bottle of honey in Nine 1/2 Weeks, and even before, we've been culturally aware of the erotic potential of food. From Redi-Whip to chocolate syrup to marshmallow creme, pretty much any edible that goes well on ice cream can also be slathered on, then licked off, a lover's body. It's a wildly erotic image, sensual and playful, and it adds another dimension of sensory involvement to passionate moments.

But it's often more fun in theory than in practice. Unlike the world of the movies, in the real world we need to deal with the aftermath: chocolate syrup dried in our hair, maraschino cherry juice soaked through the sheets into the mattress, honey smeared down the wall, smashed strawberries making a permanent sticky spot on the carpet. But I've got two pieces of advice that reduce the aftermath and make the slathering more fun.

First: don't dump or pour. Use a pastry brush or small paintbrush; it gives you a lot more control. You get to make Works Of Art (edible, tickling art!) on your lover's body, and it makes much less of a mess in the process. And, really, we're grown-ups. There's a limit to how much Magic Shell we can eat, and a brush is more suited to the quantity we'd actually like to consume.

Second: Body Fondue! Instead of chocolate syrup, use actual chocolate. Those wide, flat chocolate drops you melt for fondue are perfect, and squares of a chocolate bar are good as well. Apply them to your lover's body -- if you first lick the chocolate (or your lover!) they'll stick -- then apply your own body to your lover's, and squeeze and squirm together until the chocolate melts between you. Fun! And, the melted chocolate isn't as messy or runny or sticky as chocolate syrup. Plus, it tastes better, and you can pick chocolate that meets your tastes.

Movie Day!

2009-05-11T11:11:00.002-04:00

Laura and I haven't seen a movie in a theater since The Day the Earth Stood Still, so it's remarkable that we saw two movies in one day this weekend. We started with the 10am matinee of Wolverine, which we enjoyed. I liked the cast; Hugh Jackman was ironic and funny and enviably muscled, Liev Schreiber was a very good psychotic bad guy, and Danny Huston made a good Stryker (though Brian Cox in X2 was probably better in the role). The action was entertaining, and I got so wrapped up in the story that even the ridiculous stuff seemed completely plausible at the time (sole exception: an early moment involving swords and bullets and Deadpool, which was so hokey it bumped me out of the movie for a minute). If you're feeling like a good action movie, I'm recommending it.

I've heard a few serious comic-book fans talk about how much they hated the movie because it violated canon in numerous ways. To this I say: aww, how horrible that your fictional worlds don't precisely coincide -- obviously the older one, in comic book form, is the perfect mirror of the platonic ideal of character and setting, and any deviation is clearly blasphemy! Seriously, this whole set of arguments is pretty funny coming from comic book fans, who by this point should be used to an extremely flexible canon which varies based on the year, the writer, and the mood of the publisher. And, it stayed pretty consistent with the world of the other movies, which I did appreciate. I'm fine with them reinventing a lot of stuff for the movies, but it's just bad writing if they reinvent stuff between movies.

We took a short break, then headed back to the theater for the second movie of the day: Star Trek! I really liked this movie. I was happy to get back to the early original-series Star Trek characters, and I liked what they did with them. And, without getting spoilery, they started the movie with a plot device that'll kill all of the Trekkie canon complaints. Any "it didn't happen that way!" complaints go out the window, and it makes the movie more fun to watch. And the cast was great; Kirk and Spock have chemistry, and everyone fought the urge to imitate the old series cast member they're replacing. And, the bad guy: fanatically evil. You see what broke him, which makes him "human", but he is in no way a sympathetic character. For the serious Trekkies, the movie has a bunch of little in-jokes. They're done nicely; fans will catch them, but they're subtle enough that they won't leave newcomers with the feeling they just missed a joke. I suspect I'll have to watch this movie once more on the big screen. I'll wait two weeks, when my free passes are good, then catch it again.

Oh, and: when did matinees in Indy jump to $7.50? Ouch!

Failed writing experiment

2009-05-08T22:08:00.001-04:00

I have a tendency to rewrite while I write. I don't think this is necessarily bad; it makes my draft-zero text more readable than it would be otherwise, and if I change something important it's good to go back and change it in earlier paragraphs too -- if someone's floor changes from hardwoods to carpet, I need to correct that while it's still in my head, or make a note. But, in general, I'm working on finishing more text, even if it's not as polished. I don't know if this'll be my finished writing style, but it's a teaching tool for now, getting me in the habit of making lots words appear on the page rather than making the words perfect (ideally perfect; at this point in my writing non-career, I'll settle for legible).

So yesterday I played around a bit with writing text I couldn't edit. I switched my keyboard layout from Dvorak to standard qwerty, then touch-typed in Dvorak. The resulting text looked like gobbledygook until I ran it through a converter to make it readable; until I was finished and converted it, it wasn't even possible to read what I had just written.

This was a bad idea. Turns out, an important part of writing is the ability to read what I just wrote. But it was at least a learning experience....

The Mac(ScottishPlay) Experiment

2009-05-07T10:32:00.005-04:00

Let me just state upfront that I'm not superstitious. I'll whistle onstage, I own two black cats who cross my path regularly without harm, I'll spill salt with wild abandon. So I take an amused, detached view to superstitions in general. One of my favorites: theater people believe it's the worst possible jinx to say the word "Macbeth" in a theater. Some go so far as to never say the word, on stage or off. I think this is a wee bit silly, though I generally avoid saying the M-word just to keep my fellow stage workers from hyperventilating and falling onto power tools. The preferred substitute for "Macbeth" is "The Scottish Play"; apparently referring to Macbeth is fine, as long as you avoid the actual proper noun.

Superstitions fall apart as soon as you try to quantify them too much, though. How recently can a black cat have crossed your path to cause bad luck? If it never wears off, good luck finding any place that has never been trod upon by a black cat. Do you have to see the cat cross your path? If he's within visual range, but you're looking the wrong direction when he crosses your path, do you still get bad luck? Is it the same degree of curse if he's closer to you? What's the half-life of bad black-cat luck? What if he wanders across your path, then walks back where he came from -- do the two crossings balance out to neutral, or does your bad luck double from the second crossing (that is, is bad luck a vector or scalar quantity)? If a black cat crosses over a bridge, and you're walking under it, did he cross your path, or is your luck unchanged? Are you protected by the cat's altitude, or by the material of the bridge? If the superstition is true, there need to be answers to all of these (and many more) questions. But after a while, it becomes a bit ridiculous.

So, my Macbeth question: at what point are you allowed to start saying the M-word if you're doing an actual production onstage? I assume that the actors are allowed to read their lines, even though they frequently include the Forbidden Name. When the person gives the curtain speech, are they allowed to name the play the audience is about to watch, or do they have to say something like, "ladies and gentlemen, the Theater Company is proud to welcome you to our production of *mumblemumble*!" How about rehearsals -- when the director has a production meeting onstage, is he allowed to use the name of the play? When the tech crew is loading in the scenery, do they get to say "Macbeth"? What if you're not yet in production, but you're discussing possible shows for the upcoming season? At what point in the production or pre-production does the jinx go away?

Which led to Laura's and my funny conversation this morning. What if a theater company believed that the jinx never goes away? The play would look like this:

Guard 1: "Here approach Banquo and Scottish Guy!"
Guard 2: "Where is Lady *coughcough*?"

Or, better, have someone bleep out the M-word, as if it were an obscenity:

First Ghost: Mac[beep] Mac[beep] Mac[beep], beware Macduff, beware the Thane of Fife!

Macduff: ...Mac[beep] was from his mother's womb untimely ripped! [glares offstage]
voice offstage: ... sorry!

(pathetic) sign of the times:

2009-05-07T07:33:00.000-04:00

When you get a tune stuck in your head, and realize it's the default ringtone for your phone. This never happened to previous generations.

Bad writing advice

2009-05-06T18:23:00.002-04:00

I've read an embarrassing number of books about the craft of writing. Some have been very good, some less so; a few have been full of actively bad advice. But I've been slowly learning that none of them have what I'm looking for. And none of them ever will. Like people who collect diet books or exercise manuals, I know that at least subconsciously, I'm looking for a magic pill. I'm inherently lazy, and I'm hoping that I'll read some piece of advice that will make everything click -- that will make writing into something that isn't work.

This is a dangerous idea to carry around. It carries with it the assumption that becoming really good at writing -- at anything, for that matter -- will ever be easy. It's nice to believe that the only thing standing between me and fabulous prose is some clever bit of advice that will trip some switch in my head, and I'll suddenly turn into John Updike. It's a nice, happy belief, that somewhere inside is this Great Writer, just waiting to be freed. But it's not true, even for the very best. Being good at something is a skill you acquire through regular effort and a truly stunning amount of practice. Talent helps, I think -- it makes your practice more efficient, so you don't have to do quite as much of it. But no amount of talent will make you any damn good unless you work at it, and work hard. In that regard, maybe the only really valuable piece of writing advice I've ever read was, roughly: it's important to realize that the first million words you write will be crap; the key to a successful writing career is to get those million words out of the way as quickly as possible. (I heard this attributed to David Eddings, but I can't find it now.)

The other danger is that reading about writing is yet another write-ish behavior that feels writing-related and doesn't trip my mental I'm-Wasting-Time alarm, but gets me no closer to finishing a novel. I've got a lot of write-ish things I do, and I'm trying to be more aware of them and cut them from my schedule. I just need to be constantly aware when I'm doing stuff that feels productive, without actually producing anything.

That said, I'm not ditching my collection of writing guides. In small doses, they serve the important function of being inspirational. As long as I'm not reading them instead of writing, a little inspiration is a good thing. But I'm now aware that I'm no longer looking for The Answer. I'll occasionally look for an answer; Orson Scott Card's book on character is a classic, f'rinstance, and has answers to questions I ask a lot. But I know there's no magic there....

---edit---

Just noticed -- this was my 1,000th post here. I've got mixed feelings about that. On the one hand: cool! Landmark! On the other, look at all the time I've spent writing, none of which got me any closer to finishing a decent novel....

Internet-free days

2009-05-05T18:33:00.000-04:00

No, our ISP didn't crash. I just spent two days with no internet. I'm trying to take a day or two every week and spend it anywhere but online. It's too easy for me to sink time on le web; I'll be writing something, decide I need a fact of some sort, and go to Wikipedia or hit Google to gain some knowledge, and it's suddenly two hours later and I haven't gotten any writing done. What I did accomplish was Olympic-level link-jumping. So I'm just taking a day or two when I turn off the wifi and write. If I need to look something up, I make a note and look it up later. It's amazing how many ways I can find to waste time online.

The worst are the ones that seem somehow writerly: reading author blogs, reading fanfic or online fiction, hitting the random button on the tvtropes wiki for story ideas, things like that.
It feels like I'm being writing-focused, but without producing any finished work. I'm trying to severely limit my diet of this writing-ish activity. And a few luddite days helps a lot.

Circle City Sound!

2009-05-02T14:32:00.000-04:00

We've got a performance today by Circle City Sound (formerly the Pride of Indy Chorus), Indianapolis's barbershop chorus. Woo hoo! I really like these guys. They're extremely into what they do, and they all take it seriously while still obviously having a blast with it. And the music is excellent. I did my first show with them almost twenty years ago at the Warren, and some of the same guys are still singing; it's nice to see them still at it.

Down side: every time I do one of their shows, I spend most of the next week humming "Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby" under my breath. Usually I hum the baritone part.

my fashion statement

2009-05-01T13:16:00.003-04:00

I'm wearing a cool black shirt today. I picked it out of the closet this morning because I think it's comfortable, it shows off my upper body, and it looks stylish without being trendy. But I was just informed of the actual fashion statement my black shirt makes. Apparently, it says, "I own at least one long-haired white cat!"

That's fine. I wasn't hung up on looking cool anyway.

perfectly symmetrical violence

2009-04-30T19:27:00.002-04:00

I found this unaccountably amusing, thought I'd share:

Can you tell I'm procrastinating writing?

Facebook is a window to your soul...

2009-04-29T19:07:00.000-04:00

...and your pocketbook. Wired is currently featuring an article about how marketers use your public social-networking data to sell you things. If you've got a Facebook page, it's worth reading.

I'm of two minds about this. It instinctively creeps me out, knowing I'm under marketers' microscopes. The people who sell us stuff are extremely good at their jobs. They're so good, they've managed to turn "shopping" into a leisure activity. And their message is more layered than people realize. When a hypnotist says, "do you notice how sleepy you're feeling?", the language-processing part of your brain has to subconsciously accept the feeling sleepy part to process the grammar of the question. And any reflexive answer you give subconsciously assumes you're feeling sleepy. And ads do the same thing. You accept their subtext to process their message. They're not just selling you a laptop; they're selling you on the whole concept that you need a new laptop, that your two-year-old computer is now obsolete. They aren't just selling you beer; they're selling you the concept that you'll have more fun and people will like you more when you're drinking. And you can't fight both messages at once. According to NLP theorists, you subconsciously accept one message to reject the other. People who make ads do this kind of manipulation on purpose; they modify your perceptions of the world to make you more likely to buy their products, and the cumulative effect is staggering. And I'm not comfortable giving them too much information about me.

On the other hand, we do buy stuff, and ads are everywhere anyway. If better target marketing will reduce the ads aimed at me to things I'm actually interested in, that's not such a bad use of my personal information.

And, I'm really not seeing it as a privacy issue. It's on Facebook -- it's inherently public information, and information you entered yourself. If you want to keep something private, my deep advice is to keep it off the internet....

More Racism Revealed!

2009-04-28T21:40:00.001-04:00

I suspect that most of our prejudices are invisible, even to ourselves; without an event to make them visible, they're just part of the background noise in our heads. We make an assumption or set of assumptions, based on our own experiences, that gets validated or invalidated by further experiences, but we don't do it consciously, and probably aren't aware of it unless an event happens that shocks the hidden stereotype into view.

I had one of these today. I had never realized that I've got a stereotype about Russians. I don't think it's a normal social prejudice; I think it's just something I picked up based on my own experiences. The stereotype is, roughly: Russian=Intelligent. And thinking back, I can see where I picked it up; in my entire history with various Russians, I've never met one who wasn't pretty darn smart and well-educated.

And today I met an exception. After a few minutes talking to the guy, I caught myself thinking, "you can't be this stupid -- you're Russian!", and I realized I had this prejudice lurking in my subconscious. It makes me wonder how many other prejudices like this are living in my head....

an unmasculine thing to admit

2009-04-28T17:01:00.001-04:00

I read manuals.

I know, I know: real men aren't supposed to read the manual. I lose guyness points merely by admitting that when I open a box I usually read the manual before I start playing with wires and widgets. But I use a lot of technical gear, and a lot of it is so complex, you'd never figure it out by just punching buttons. And even if you did, you'd miss a pile of little tricks that are in the documentation. So I've been in the directions-reading habit for a while.

Maybe the first place I learned the importance of RTFM was the first time I tried to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture sans instructions. I ended up with pieces not fitting, holes stripped from using an off-size fastener, and a very wobbly bookcase (which I immediately reinforced with plywood, construction adhesive, and pneumatic staples; reading manuals doesn't completely invalidate my other guy qualities). Now, even if I've assembled something just like it before, I still read the instructions first, just in case.

Also, I get a moderate amount of comedy by reading manuals. Maybe my favorites are for Rane audio gear. My splitter/mixer manual begins like this:

Realizing that in most areas there are laws against reading owners manuals, and that reading them under the blankets at night with a flashlight makes you feel stupid, we therefore provide this brief, yet legal description of how to use the SM26B just in case your batteries are low and your mother is about to come in the room.
To achieve a quick understanding of the SM26B, think of it as a six channel mixer with faders and pans only. Or think of it as a 2-to-6 channel splitter with output level controls and a mix knob. If you get that, you may stop here. If you're really hardcore, wiring block diagrams are in appendix B. Otherwise, read on.

See the tech comedy I'd miss out on if I skipped the manual!

Believe it or not, I also at least glance through the owner's manual when we rent a car. This is how I find the extra aux jacks for the radio, figure out how to turn off the emergency alarm (good to know this in advance!), how the cruise control or hybrid controls work, things like that. The irritating car company: Nissan, whose manuals are in the glove box, but on DVD ROM. So, great -- if we accidentally activate the alarm, we need to find a computer to figure out how to turn it off. Laura had an Altima (otherwise an extremely nice car!) for a week on tour, and we never knew you didn't need to use the buttons on the remote to open the door. It works on RFID; as long as you've got it with you, you only need to push that little button on the door handle. This is a handy feature, one it would've been nice to know about in advance. And it's the kind of thing for which it's better to read the manual. Sure, you could learn almost everything through experimentation. But it's much more efficient to read the directions than to waste time fumbling and bumbling. And I'm fine with sacrificing a little macho on the altar of information.

Wild Ratio Swings

2009-04-25T15:45:00.001-04:00

Since Valentine's Day, our cats-to-humans ratio has gone from 4:2 (the Chaka-Koko-Meeper-Emmett standard) to 5:2 (plus Bowie) to 8:2 (Bowie plus her kittens). As of yesterday morning, we're back to 4:2. We put Bowie and her three new kittens out in the garage. We enjoyed having the kittens in the house; they're still in the Cute phase, while being a month or so from the Cute But Underfoot phase. But we thought it'd be easier to put them outside sooner rather than later, so they wouldn't get adapted to life inside. If they did, it'd seem a bit cruel to put them outside. And, the longer they stayed inside, the more likely we'd get attached to them and let them stay inside. Eight cats inside is too many, even for us; four or five is the solid maximum.

People who don't own cats don't know that having friendly, well-adjusted cats in the house takes a lot of energy. I'm not talking about task-oriented cat maintenance, the changing of litter boxes and feeding; that falls under the major heading of Household Chores. If you have cats, and you want them to be happy, you need to pay attention to them. You can't just ignore them or treat them like pests. And if you want them to be well-adjusted and friendly, you need to do it at least partially on the cats' schedules. If they want attention, you need to pay attention to them, at least most of the time. I know cat owners who disagree with this, but they tend to have cats who are surly, skittish, or invisible. And we don't have the time and energy for eight cats. If we kept the kittens inside and adopted them, we'd pretty quickly find ourselves with a house full of unhappy, surly cats....

The highlight of my day

2009-04-23T07:50:00.001-04:00

This afternoon we've got a performance by this guy, and he's the highlight of my performance week -- maybe of my whole month. He plays extremely good instrumental guitar in a unique style, and he's great fun to work with. We've got a rule that we only hire local performers; some of them come from as far away as Bloomington or South Bend, but most live in Indy. He's the most distant musician we've ever hired, by at least an order of magnitude -- he's French, and he lives in England. So if you get a chance, he's worth stopping by for.

We really don't have any bad performers, or even any who aren't actively good. But this guy's so unique and so entertaining to watch, he's special even by our high standards....

Seasonal Sartorial Disorder

2009-04-22T16:38:00.003-04:00

I suffer from a fairly common bicycle commuter's malady: Seasonal Sartorial Disorder. SSD is close to Seasonal Affective Disorder, except instead of getting moody, we suffer angst about what to wear on the bike. We're in that odd time of year when it's close to freezing for the morning bike ride, and over 60 degrees for the ride home. And there's no good clothing option that keeps you comfy at both temperatures. Our options are to either be cold in the morning, to be hot in the evening, or to be overloaded with an extra set of cycle clothes, in addition to our work clothes.

I'm better suited to dressing for the ride home. I'm cold on the ride in, but I'd rather be cold than hot. And, as long as I keep my ears warm, I've got an easy solution for getting chilly on the ride: pedal faster!

I don't know any cyclists who go for option three, packing extra clothes. Serious cyclists are happy to spend a few thousand dollars on a bike that's a few pounds lighter; they're not going to nullify their weight savings by packing extra cargo if they can help it. I suspect there might be an Option Four: buy extremely expensive bike clothes that work across a 45-degree temperature range. I don't know if such clothes exist, but if they do, they're out of my price range....

Another secret to a happy marriage

2009-04-18T16:00:00.001-04:00

So, we're all familiar with the more traditional elements that make up a happy marriage: communication, trust, honesty, et cetera. I've got a new one for the list: extremely bad puns. Laura and I engage in bad puns on a regular basis, and I think it strengthens our marriage. As an example, the last song on the radio before we went outside to work in the garden this morning was Tim Curry's "I Do The Rock", which we both find an unaccountably entertaining song. And, after a few minutes of pulling weeds and planting herbs, we had this conversation:

Laura: "I heard that, before Tim Curry was an actor and singer, he worked as a cook in a Chinese restaurant."
Jeff: "Really?"
Laura: "Yeah -- he do the Wok!"
Jeff: "Oh, so that was after he did suspension work at an auto body shop."
Laura: "Really?"
Jeff: "Yeah, he do the Shock!"
Laura: "I heard he was a shepherd for a while, too."
Jeff: "So... he do the Flock?"
Laura: "Yeah!"
Jeff: "I hear he auditioned for a Star Trek movie."
Laura: "You're kidding; he do the Spock? And I heard he was an offensive lineman on his college's football team."
Jeff: "So he can do the Block -- nice one. Didn't he invent the polymer-framed handgun?"
....

This continued for probably twenty minutes, back and forth. It was amazing how many -ock rhymes we could come up with. And Laura and I are evenly matched in bad-pun skills; we don't have a pun-off often, but when we do, it's a blast.

What a show!

2009-04-17T20:54:00.002-04:00

I just saw an excellent show. Dance Kaleidoscope and the Indiana Repertory Theatre did an experimental co-production tonight. They used Margaret Atwood's script for The Penelopiad, the story of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus. Margaret Atwood not only wrote the story, she also wrote a play script in Greek drama style. Tonight, DK and IRT did the first several scenes, maybe 25 minutes, with three actors playing the roles of Penelope, Icarius, and Odysseus, and the dancers serving as maids and oracles and suitors and other assorted ducks and wedding guests. And it was an amazing production. It was a complete synergy of movement and song and performance, beautiful and moving and energetic.

They used no scenery, minimal props, and no costuming, and the piece was performed under worklights; it stood entirely on the strength of the script and the performers, who were still on book after only four days of rehearsal and choreography. And I think this was for the best. It's easy to pile Production on a production, elaborate scenery and costuming that in no way serves the story and primarily serves as a showcase for the theater, rather than as support for the story and characters. And it was nice to see a show that survived, and wowed me, strictly on the basis of the story and performers. It's a reminder that, while all that production stuff is nice (and, not incidentally, what I do for a living), it's really secondary. If they ever get the wherewithal to mount the full production, I hope they approach scenery and costuming from a minimalist standpoint.

Another bit of comedy: union rules are one of the biggest impediments to mounting a full production. The IRT is a union house for actors and stage managers, and union rules add a lot of expensive hurdles to a production like this. The added rehearsal time, plus the huge cast (the dancers would have to be under Equity contracts as well), would push the staff costs for the full show to around triple the IRT's usual show, so they're not doing it. The irony of actor's union rules keeping plays from being produced is, I hope, not lost on the performers and staff. I'm a little evil about this; I'd be tempted to call all the actors and tell them about this great show they could be in, if their union rules didn't kill the production....

And, I hate to say, but if you didn't see the "Penelopiad Experiment", you won't; it was one performance only. And, not to rub it in, but you missed a heck of a performance. Neener, neener! (Okay, I'll rub it in a little....)

Kitten Mortality

2009-04-17T08:11:00.002-04:00

So far, in the first eight hours, we've had 25% kitten mortality: the litter started with four kittens, and we're already down to three. We're hoping it stabilizes here, but the odds aren't good; I don't know what the bigger statistics are, but we're closer to 60% with our feral colony, and that's only Natural Causes. If you factor in Unnatural Causes, like dog attacks, we've got to be closer to 90%. Case in point: Ghost and Tommy just had kittens a few days apart in the garage. Tommy's litter went from five to one in the first four days, and Ghost's went from five to two in the first three weeks; she would've lost another one, which got trapped in a basket in the garage, if I didn't notice and rescue the kitten with wire cutters. Tommy's last litter, early last summer, went from four to zero in under a minute; one of the stray dogs that lives in Brookside Park jumped our fence.

One of our lingering questions has been what to do with the deceased kittens. We've gotten more jaded as time's gone on. At this point, if the cat is old enough that we've named it, we'll bury it and plant something over it in the garden (Tosca's poppies started blooming last week). If it's too young or unknown to have a name yet, we just bag it and drop it in the trash....

(Yet) more kittens

2009-04-16T22:46:00.002-04:00

It's late, I'm tired, but I can't hop in bed just yet. Why not? Because we just found a cat giving birth on our bedspread. That's why not.

Remember Bowie, our new kitten? Turns out she was pregnant when we let her in the house (cat gestational period: 9 weeks, so she had to be pregnant already). We didn't realize until a few weeks ago that she wasn't just getting fat on the rich indoor kitty diet, and by then we would've felt bad throwing her out.

We're still not sure what to do about the kittens. My first thought is to carry the mom and babies outside (I put Bowie in a big plastic tote as soon as we found her in labor) and leave them in the garage; it's pretty safe, and the weather's not bad. I really don't want any more cats inside. Bowie herself seems like maybe one too many sometimes. So a pile of kittens -- while extremely cute -- will eventually turn into a herd of cats we don't have space for or inclination to keep. But I won't put them out until tomorrow at the earliest.

So, anyone want a kitten?

Coffee economy

2009-04-16T14:01:00.001-04:00

I just figured out something surprising: if you make it at home, the price of a latte is about 65% of the price of a cup of brewed coffee. Until I measured, I didn't realize how much less coffee you use to make espresso. And you don't need to keep half-and-half on hand, like you do with coffee. I figure a latte at home costs close to 45 cents: 25 cents for the milk, 15 cents for the coffee, and a nickel for the sugar. Brewed coffee costs close to 45 cents just for the coffee alone, plus another 20 cents for half-and-half and a nickel for sugar. I was doing math to see how much money we'd save by going back to regular coffee, and I'm pleasantly surprised to find we've got financial incentive to stick with our traditional morning latte. Of course, this doesn't factor in that an espresso machine costs a lot more than a coffee pot. But we already own it; I'm just looking at daily expense here.

Of the funny, Laura and I have a running joke about my equivalent Starbucks experience. We rarely skip the morning latte; it's conservative to assume I make 600 lattes a year, and we've been doing this for six years. A busy barista makes at most 100 a day (plus, of course, a pile of mochas and iced coffees and every other random half-skim half-caf no-whip caramel macchiato a customer asks for). This means I've got over a month of Starbucks-equivalent latte experience!

And I make a killer mocha, too....

I wish I were this clever!

2009-04-15T12:49:00.003-04:00

Randall Munroe invents a coathanger-based widget to allow him to read in bed with ease. Pro: you need only a coathanger and pliers to make the widget. Con: you need an Amazon Kindle 2. But it's wildly clever and extremely practical, and it solves a problem that everyone has....

Pimp My MacBook

2009-04-15T10:12:00.002-04:00

Every so often, when I've got a few minutes to kill near a computer, I play a game on shopping websites. I pick something you can extensively customize, then I hunt for the most expensive possible customization. I don't know why I find it so amusing, but I'm interested to know that, if you really wanted one, Apple would build you a $20,000 Mac Pro, or Toyota would sell you a Rav4 (base price: $21,500) for $36,000.

Now that I think about it, it might be a bit cathartic for me to do this kind of exercise. I generally go the other direction when I buy stuff -- is there any way I can get this $50 piece of hardware for $40? So temporarily pretending I've got huge cash reserves is a cheap, quick financial power trip.

I needed that.

2009-04-14T14:10:00.001-04:00

We paid our taxes yesterday. And I mean paid. Unlike a lot of people, we don't get a refund -- we have self-employment income, so we owe social security, and we don't have taxes withheld from these jobs. And this year was a bigger hit than we were expecting. So I spent this morning feeling depressed about money. And I wanted a treat of some kind, even if it's my usual $2 coffee-and-bagel combo, but I just couldn't justify spending the money.

So, I was a bit down when I was setting up for the Indiana Secretary of State seminar in the Artsgarden today. But, it turned out that Chick-fil-A donated a bunch of lunches for the seminar patrons. So when they brought me yummy lunch (with a fudge brownie!), it was exactly what I needed. It's a little thing, I know, but that free lunch really brightened my outlook and gave me the vibe that better times are ahead. I know it's a little silly, but I feel much, much better now....

It's hard being a superhero

2009-04-13T23:16:00.003-04:00

Laura and I trekked through a huge parking lot Saturday. As I was walking past a wide variety of vehicles, it occurred to me: if I were a superhero, and I needed to pick up a car and wallop a supervillain with it, I'd have a problem. There's no good way to pick up a car! You can't grab it by the bumper; that piece of expensive, color-matched plastic will pop right off. You probably couldn't even get enough lift on the bumper to pick the car up high enough to grab the axle. Ditto, any upper part of the frame, or any part of the body. I think my best bet, if I had to whack Masked Menace with a car, would be to pick it up by a wheel, then flip it enough that I could grab the axle. Even then, the axle would probably not deal well with the strain of being used as a handle; pieces would bend or pop, and the resultant wobble would throw my aim off.

Maybe better would be a car with a trailer hitch; while it also wouldn't take the strain of being used as a hand grip, it's at least bolted directly to the frame. I suspect I'd have to swing just right, to not apply to much torque to the frame or the hitch -- maybe grab the hitch, then swing the car straight overhead and drop it on top of the arch-fiend. But swinging it like a giant baseball bat probably wouldn't work.

I think probably the best vehicular villain-basher would be construction equipment. Almost any part of a bulldozer could be used as an effective lever. They're built to take strain from odd angles, so you could grab it by the frame or the bucket or even by a convenient tread-axle and use it to smite evil. Plus, they're heavy and solid; they'd pack one heck of a wallop.

I have to wonder if this train of thought (ooh, train car -- another good weapon!) occurs to most people. It'd be comforting to know it's just me.

Cathartic Cleaning

2009-04-13T19:00:00.002-04:00

I cleaned my desk today.

No, really -- this is a big deal. I'm a bit of pack rat when it comes to my desk space. In the vicinity of my desk I've got not only all the usual desk cruft, I've also got a mountain of old computer hardware and software. I've got install disks and hardware left over from my old Pentium I bought in 1994. It's not my fault that I hold on to this stuff. I've been conditioned to keep it around forever. Every time I throw something away, I find out a few days (or even hours) later that I need it. The obscurity of the item I discard seems to have an inverse relationship with how long it'll be until I need it. Last time I cleaned, I remember thinking, "when am I ever going to need 3 1/2 to 5 1/4" drive rail adapters?" Answer: about two hours after the trash truck came. Soon after, I threw away a Windows 98 install disc, almost sixteen hours before Laura needed to install an offline editor for a light board. Which only ran in Windows 98. So the fates have told me not to dump this stuff.

But today I did. I filled two grocery sacks with junk. The computer software and hardware was easy, and I threw away an amazing amount of stuff. And I organized what I kept -- I've got neat ziplock baggies with labels like, "Laura's laptop restore discs" and "obscure but useful drivers". I even threw away old games. And I've resolved to not worry about throwing away anything I might regret. It'll be less than the regret involved with keeping all this crap in my workspace.

On the other hand, I feel odd about throwing away my stack of audio cassettes. I had live recordings of theater shows I did fifteen years ago. I had mix tapes made by friends in high school. I had Dweezil Zappa's first album. I had live recordings of the Indiana Ragtime Festival, old Prairie Home Companion joke shows, compilations I made to listen to while driving. And it all went in the trash. I've got some good memories attached to a lot of this stuff. But I'm in a cleaning mood, and I haven't listened to anything on cassette in at least four years. Getting rid of old mix tapes from friends I haven't seen in years was a bit difficult. But when they were here, I didn't listen to them. It occurs to me that maybe their value has less to do with the music on them, and more to do with their totemic power: here are (somewhat) handmade expressions of friendship and love, always there to remind me of the people who care about me. So maybe I'll dig through the bag and save a few. But the old show tapes of "Decades!" from Glacier National Park -- those can go.

The part I haven't finished involves sorting through the huge stack of unlabeled CDs and DVDs which were piled on the floor and the desk and in boxes. I might be able to assume that if I haven't needed it yet, I probably won't; on the other hand, some of it might be of interest, if not actually important. So the plan is to do a few a day until the pile's gone.

Expensive taste

2009-04-12T13:18:00.002-04:00

It's axiomatic that personal taste isn't a matter of right and wrong; someone who doesn't like shrimp has no better or worse taste than someone who thinks shrimp is the most perfect foodstuff ever eaten. Sure, there are some general standards: spoiled food is generally bad, rotting anything is generally frowned upon. But for the most part taste is, yeah, a matter of taste.

That said, there are standards for taste, and they're generally set by experts. I'm specifically thinking about wine. An expensive wine is generally agreed to be better than a cheap wine. Some of it's supply and demand: the expensive wines are rarer and therefore more expensive. But some of the rarity is manufactured; a specific wine might be vinted in a smaller production run to add to its value. And the rest of the value is a factor of what wine experts tell us. The experts tell us it's the best wine of the year, and it gets expensive. The experts tell us it's not so good, and it's cheaper. But, again, it's all a matter of taste. If you have expensive tastes -- that is, if you agree with the experts 100% of the time -- that's not a good thing. What's more likely: all of your subjective judgments independently agree with the pronouncements of a panel of experts; or, you've let the experts' pronouncements define your tastes for you. Option one is statistically unlikely. And option two would be a bit embarrassing to admit. But, especially with wine, I suspect that a lot of people's tastes really are determined by the pronouncements of the experts. It'd be hard not to internalize expert opinions about wine; they sound so formal, so authoritative, it's natural to assume they're right, especially since they all tend to agree. But they only agree because they all went to the same school (in the "school of painting" sense, rather than the "educational establishment" sense), wherein they were graded on their ability to agree in detail with other experts.

Laura started me thinking about this when we went out for post-show dinner on Friday. She ordered the least expensive chardonnay, and she was extremely impressed with it; we're adding it to her list of favorites. She's got good taste, but it's entirely defined by her internal values, rather than what experts have determined to be the best. She likes some expensive wines, too, but it's because the experts and she happen to agree occasionally; she doesn't fall into the "expensive = quality" trap. I really respect this about her.

I also respect the fact that she is always willing to try the new and different, rather than falling into habit and ordering the same thing every time. I think she works under the assumption that she hasn't tried her favorite wine yet; she's got favorites, but she knows there has to be good and different that she hasn't experienced yet.

Oh, and: Friday's wine was Pure Evil, a South Australian chardonnay. Laura gives it her stamp of approval. If you're a wine-oriented person and you see it on a menu, give it a try and see how closely your taste matches with Laura's.

teevee-free

2009-04-11T19:42:00.000-04:00

I heard the apocryphal number that people who say "I don't watch television" in surveys, average 9 hours of television viewing a week. Laura and I don't watch television regularly, and I can prove it: we don't have cable or a satellite dish or an antenna. All of our television comes in the form of DVDs, which we get from the library; in the last year or so, we've seen a few seasons of CSI, she's seen a season of Smallville, and I watched two seasons of CSI: Miami (am I the only one who thinks David Caruso is actually pretty cool?) while Laura was out of town in February and March.

And I just figured out that we haven't turned on the television since she got home. I had unplugged the TV to plug in my electric blanket in the den while she was gone, and I just realized today when I was packing up the electric blanket for the winter that it's still plugged in there. We've gone four weeks, as of today, without realizing the television hasn't been plugged in. I feel so unAmerican....

Perfect for your World Domination needs!

2009-04-10T12:41:00.003-04:00

This week in the Artsgarden, we're displaying the entries in the American Institute of Architects design contest. The participants are all high-school students in architecture classes, and the theme of this year's contest is interesting: design a laboratory built into a cliff face. I couldn't look at some of the designs without picturing them on Villain Source's lairs and bases page. They'd be the perfect place from which to scheme nefariously, only missing the shark trap, femme fatale lodgings, and large, obvious self-destruct mechanism.

We've had the AIA high school design competition here for five or six years, and even in this short span of time I've noticed that the design submissions have become very polished -- CAD and rendering software has allowed even high-school kids to produce professional-looking designs, with simulated images and pro-quality layouts. This has the side effect of making even bad designs look good. I really needed to pay attention to figure out which designs are functional and workable and which aren't, because they all look so presentable. I think people have an inherent sense for good design. Something designed well is instinctively more appealing than something designed poorly. But well-presented good design doesn't inherently click with viewers any more than well-presented bad design.

I also think that bad design is more obvious than good design. It's easier to look at a display board and notice that the restrooms-to-occupants ratio is off, or that the walls are all difficult-to-build multidimensional curves, or that they've got wind turbines to generate power mounted three feet from a cliff face. But it's hard to look at several good designs and decide which would be more ergonomic, easier to work in, or more practical. The best design comes from a gestalt of a huge collection of factors, and it isn't immediately obvious, or even apparent after much study, which is the best gestalt....

Anyway, if you're in the neighborhood you might get a kick out of the designs. Some of them are very clever, and some of them are thought-provoking. They're on display through next Thursday evening.

Odd days off

2009-04-08T18:59:00.001-04:00

One of the things I really like about my job is the odd schedule. Like today; it's Wednesday, and I'm off. I'm also off next Monday and Tuesday, I think. The people who do paperwork say that I need two days off every week, and I agree wholeheartedly. But I need to work a lot of weekends, so my days off tend to be placed almost at random, instead of conveniently arranged on the traditional Saturday/Sunday weekend. And when I've got a random Wednesday off, it seems like a treat, a surprise, because I'm still mentally attached to the weekends-off paradigm. There's no excuse for this; my entire adult life, I've worked in the theater, where you tend to work all weekend, every weekend. With the exception of a warehouse job during college, I've never had a Monday thru Friday job. But I still tend to see weekdays off as something special and out-of-the-ordinary. This is probably a good thing, because this point of view means that all my days off feel at least a little like holidays.

And, at the risk of sounding extremely antisocial: days off are always good, but days off when most people are expected to be working are better. It's not uncommon for some outside force to try to appropriate my weekends for their own purposes; it's assumed I won't be working, so I'm free to do whatever they want, at the risk of social penalty if I balk. Working weekends has the huge advantage of being a true, absolute excuse for not doing what other people want me to on my days off. And, as an added bonus, it gives me days off during the week, when people don't think to commandeer my time. A day off on the weekend might become someone else's time, but a weekday off is 100% pure mine mine mine! Selfish, but true....

We Are Not Easily Impressed.

2009-04-07T13:38:00.002-04:00

For a typical performance at the Artsgarden, we'll usually have a crowd of 25 to 75 people seated at any time. But over the course of the performance, around 1500 people will walk through the space and catch a bit of the show. Some will stop and catch a few minutes of the show, and some are apparently so wrapped up in themselves that they won't even notice there's a performance going on. But most people will at least glance up at the stage and see what's happening.

Today's performance was by Gregg Bacon, saxophonist extraordinaire. He does a trick wherein he plays three (!) saxophones at once. It's exactly as impressive as you'd think. But I'm also entertained by watching the crowd's reaction. The most typical reaction is surprise and amazement. I'll see someone glance at the stage and see a guy playing three saxophones; it takes a moment to sink in, but when it does, they'll at minimum point so their friends notice. More typically, they'll stop for a moment and watch. But the ones that I really wonder about are the people who glance at the stage, then keep walking coolly on. I see a few options: they're looking, but not really paying attention, so the sax trick doesn't register; they see Gregg playing three saxophones at once, but have no background to realize that it's out of the ordinary; or they're so determined to be nonplussed with the world around them that they pretend they don't care. Mostly this last group consist of teenagers, who radiate a vibe that says, "ho hum, guy playing three saxophones, been there, done that."

A few weeks ago, we had the Blue Monkey Sideshow in the Artsgarden -- a real circus-style sideshow, complete with a bed of nails and jugglers and all kinds of carnival tricks. I didn't work it, so I didn't get to watch the crowd. But I wonder if they got the same reaction from teenagers: "ho hum, guy squeezing himself through a tennis racket, ho hum, guy smashing light bulbs with his forehead, so not impressed...". It seems like sideshow tricks would be the sort of thing that it's cool for teens to notice, but I still wonder....

Facts in fiction

2009-04-06T21:09:00.002-04:00

I'm reading a book in which I found two factual errors in five pages. The author has a short scene happen in a chem lab in which the laws of chemistry don't apply, then a scene in a gym wherein a character uses a nonexistent machine (a "biceps press machine", with a weight stack that goes to 400 pounds). This kind of factual authorial error has always bothered me; it's outside the realm of normal suspension of disbelief. I'll accept that a character can turn invisible and still see clearly, even though light is passing through their eyes (and the rest of their body) without stopping; I'm fine with a matter teleporter that works in opposition to the normal laws of physics; I'll grant the existence of vampires. This stuff moves the story forward, and it's part of the world the author establishes. They're deliberate choices an author makes. But once an author establishes his world, he has to stick with it and live with its rules. If a fictional cab makes it from Brooklyn to the Bronx in ten minutes, that's an author error. If a golfer hits a hole-in-one with his twelve iron, that's an error two ways -- no such club, and even if there were, it'd be the wrong one for distance. If a character hops on a Harley, he had better not stomp the accelerator; the throttle's on the grip. An author getting his facts wrong kicks me out of the story.

And today, it finally occurred to me why it bothers me when authors get facts wrong. When I read about a subject I'm not familiar with, I like getting the feeling that I'm learning while I read -- that what I'm reading is True, even if I know I'm reading fiction. When I read a suspense novel set in an airport, I feel like I'm getting to see the back-end operation of an airport; when I read a story set in Scotland, I want to believe I'm seeing Scotland, that the buildings and customs are authentic. And information I pick up in fiction becomes part of my background working knowledge. So when an author makes factual errors that I can catch, it throws into doubt all of their other "facts" -- the story no longer seems True. And I have to be almost consciously aware that a lot of the "facts" I'm reading might be complete inventions, so they don't slip into my pool of background knowledge about the subject. It's distracting.

I feel a bit foolish, admitting I (at least unconsciously) try to pick up actual facts by reading fiction. But this is somewhat mollified by the knowledge that a large chunk of Americans pick up their political news from comedians....

Feline auditory acuity

2009-04-03T14:32:00.001-04:00

We all know that cats and dogs don't see in the same range that humans do; they can see better in low light, but are largely colorblind. I've recently been wondering if the same thing is true of cats' hearing -- if they can't hear some sounds that people can. I've been using my cats as study subjects and conducting experiments. Here are the results of my observations so far:

Stimulus	Range of hearing
Can opener Other cats fighting Bacon wrapper crinkling "Treat!" "Down!", "Off!" back door creaking cat-food can shaking	100 feet 150 feet 200 feet 60 feet inaudible 100 feet 60 feet

Nothing scientifically conclusive yet, but it warrants further study.

Oop, gotta go -- I hear a Pringles can opening somewhere....

This should've been obvious...

2009-04-02T20:15:00.002-04:00

If you're fixing the seal around one of your car doors with any kind of adhesive product, make sure the glue has fully cured before tightly closing the door!

That is all.

Define "realistic"

2009-04-02T17:29:00.000-04:00

In fictional terms, I suspect that realistic, as it applies to characters and events, has little to do with the real world. It's more of a synonym for believable, which a lot of real events and people aren't. In the comment thread for my take on race and stereotyping in writing, I mentioned that I know real people who are way too stereotypical to use as characters; they're real, but that doesn't mean they'd look good on the page.

It also occurred to me that in my early- to mid-twenties, I had a friend who was a living, breathing Marty Stu. He was good-looking, tough, and an expert in everything. He was a computer hacker, an engineer, and an expert combat marksman. He was the most accomplished martial artist his age I've ever met; he was inhumanly fast, and had an inherent gift for fighting (I've met better fighters, but not many, and they're all at least a decade older than him). He was a rock climber, he could fix cars, and I heard he was a good dancer with excellent taste in wine. He could quote huge chunks of the Bible from memory, yet was a complete heathen. Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. He was a real person, but as a fictional character he'd be as believable as the movie version of James Bond.

This is one of the biggest challenges I have writing -- making characters who can do extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances, yet still read as real people, not superhero stereotypes. It's one of the reasons I like John Scalzi's Old Man's War so much: John Perry is so completely a hero, yet so completely a normal, everyday guy. I didn't realize how hard it is to hit this balance until I hammered my head against it for a while. And OMW is practically an object lesson in how to do it right.

It's a habit I'm working on breaking in my writing -- the tendency to justify writing that doesn't quite sound right by saying things like, "but I just heard someone talking like that!", or "but I know a guy who can do that!", or "something like this was just on the news!" I know it's bad writing, but it's easier than good writing. :-)

The Race Fail

2009-04-01T17:22:00.003-04:00

In case you missed it, the sci-fi and fantasy community online has been buzzing for two months with a discussion of race and fiction. The entire discussion has been labeled RaceFail '09. If you haven't caught any of this, for heaven's sake don't try to catch up now. I estimate the discussion to run over two million words, divided between a few hundred blogs and comment threads. And the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad, for several reasons: a lot of the signal has been lost (in the form of locked/deleted/screened posts and comment threads), a lot of repeat in the signal (hundreds of people have said essentially the same thing in lots of different words, and several people have said the same things in lots of different places), and a lot of noise in the signal (it's occasionally devolved into vitriolic screaming matches). A few people on every side of the issue have behaved poorly, quite a few people involved have been rabidly angry, and the floors over at LiveJournal are sticky with mouth froth and flung poo. Don't get me wrong -- it's an important discussion, I've found it enlightening, and a lot of important things have been said. But, like I said: two million words. You can't sort through it, because so much of it's gone and because you can't put a coherent timeline together across all the venues where discussion was happening. Like Inigo Montoya said: "Let me explain.... No, there is to much. Let me sum up." So if you're interested, I recommend this short summary; it's as good a short introduction as you're likely to find, and all of the links are worthwhile, if you want to read deeper. I'm also recommending this essay; it was enlightening.

A lot of the discussion involves White Guy Privilege -- the concept that being white folk, and especially white and male, has a huge number of advantages, and that white guys are generally blind to their privilege, in the same way fish are generally unaware of water. This part of the discussion has been instructive. When I look around and pay attention, I become aware of a lot of the ways in which being a white guy works to my advantage. It hasn't had much professional impact; I'm a tech guy. But I have a broad-spectrum peace of mind that I probably wouldn't have were I not a white guy. F'rinstance, I just had expensive car repairs done. I suspect if I were a persecuted minority (or a woman), the thought would've at least crossed my mind that I got slapped with the unofficial Colored/Ovaried Fee. If I don't get a job I want, I'll never have to wonder if my race has anything to do with it -- or, if I get the job, I won't ever wonder if I only got in because I fill a quota. I bicycle at night through neighborhoods that I couldn't ride through in daylight if I weren't a guy (it helps that I've got lots of expert-level hitting-people training). This is just a tiny sampling of what I've thought of, and I'm sure White Guy Privilege impacts me in ways that will never occur to me.

Another major feature of the whole RaceFail discussion has been a bunch of White Guys claiming they're not racist and not trying to cause any offense, and a bunch of People of Color reminding them that, really, they are racist, and accidental offense is still offense. This is mostly valid, too. With the first point, it's arguable that everyone is racist, and with the second point, it's true that writers can control their work, but not another's reaction to their work. There's a huge ongoing discussion in fine-art circles about this issue, and the consensus swings like a pendulum from Artist's Intention Reigns Supreme, to The Audience Is Never Wrong. If the artist thinks his painting is about the triumph of deconstructionism over structuralism, but the audience thinks it's about gloomy birds sitting on a split-rail fence, the current thinking in the art world seems to favor the artist. The RaceFail discussion swings the pendulum hard in the other direction; if anyone finds your writing offensive in any way, it's therefore offensive, regardless of the author's intention.

I don't know that I entirely buy this argument. For one thing, critics always look through the lens of their own worldview. I once heard a college professor talk about the undercurrent of sexism in Piet Mondrian's work. I thought this was empirically untrue to the point of ridiculousness, but she took offense at the "sexist themes" of his work (if you don't know Mondrian, click that link and look at the sample works). I can't argue with the fact that she was offended. But merely because she found something to be offended at, doesn't automatically make anything about the work inherently offensive. Hostile Media Effect: it isn't just for news sources.

As a novice fiction writer, I had two reactions to the RaceFail. First, a completely selfish "oh, great -- something else to keep track of in my writing. As if pacing, structure, theme, dialogue, plot, and character arc weren't enough!" Just thinking about it drives me to fits of italics.

Second, this introduces a whole new category of error that writers can commit. If I write that Dirk Blackthorn stared darkly into the obsidian fireplace, watching the reflection of the flames dancing on the dark glass, I'm committing an error of fact. Obsidian would crack apart with the heat if you used it to build a fireplace. If I have Dirty Larry draw his .44 Magnum Desert Eagle and blast away at bad guys, I'm committing a research error; no automatic pistol is chambered for .44 Magnum. If I write that Oliver Crumley stepped off a double-decker bus in Trafalgar Square, munching heartily on a bag of chips, I had better mean French fries, else he should be munching from a packet of crisps. This would be an error of usage. But if I have a character say another character is scary like the boogeyman, I may have just used a racial slur, offensive to the Buganese people on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi -- the error is compounded if the character in question is, indeed, Buganese, because now I'm stereotyping and reinforcing cultural misconceptions with my writing. Suddenly I've jumped into a whole new category of error -- I've now committed a moral error. I've crossed the line from doing bad fact-checking to being a racist, a sinner, a Bad Person.

The worst part is, you can't avoid screwing up. If I decided to learn Cantonese, I could spend years mastering the lexicon and pronunciation and syntax and culture that make up the language. But no native speaker would ever confuse me for another native speaker. A thousand little cues and quirks would give me away. Similarly, no matter how much I work at it and research and travel, I can never get a foreign culture completely right. It occurs to me that it's almost offensive to assume I could. And it doesn't matter if the culture in question is in Chad or Chile or China -- or even ten blocks from my house, where the barbershop window says "Estetica Unisex" and the meat shop is a carnicero. If a native looks close enough, they'll always see the gaps in my grammar, the Spanish words painted over English thoughts. But with language, you've got the advantage that, as long as you're making the effort and manage to communicate, natives will overlook your intermittent incorrect usage and poor grammar. When you're writing The Other, any minor lapse is all it takes to get people crying "racist!"; it's a tighter standard, according to a large number of RaceFail participants.

Further, if you include any bit of ethnicity, your ethnic character had better not exhibit any stereotypical traits. The difficulty of writing flawed characters who are also non-WhiteGuy is that your flaws can't be perceived to line up with any existing ethnic stereotypes. If I've got a stingy, skinflint shop owner, he had damn well better not be Jewish, or any other ethnicity with a stereotype for pinching pennies. You even need to avoid non-negative stereotypes; what instigated RaceFail was, apparently (I should mention I never read the book in question, just the critique), a white author writing about a tall, well-endowed black man. Neither of these traits are undesirable -- they can, respectively, get you the corner office (according to the business world), and hot babes (according to my spam trap). But they (amongst other things) were considered damning evidence of authorial racism. So, if I'm writing a lesbian character, I need to pay extra attention to make sure she doesn't wear flannel or drive a pickup truck; if she were a straight girl, she could wear and drive whatever makes the character work. If I'm writing a Puerto Rican character, I need to make sure he doesn't play baseball.

And that's another writing problem: I don't have any Puerto Rican stereotypes floating around in my head. I know a few Puerto Ricans, but I've never heard anyone making snide comments about them. I just threw out the baseball example because I just listened to a news story about Major League Baseball recruiters in Puerto Rico. I have no idea if that's an actual stereotype, or if I just made it up. But if I wanted to write a Puerto Rican character, I would need to do research to make sure it's not. In order to make sure you avoid stereotypes and misculturizations for unfamiliar ethnicities, you need to spend a lot of time learning about the stereotypes. I can't pinpoint why, but this instinctively seems like a bad practice. Packing my head with this stuff, just so I can purposely avoid it, seems like not only bad writing, but also bad moral practice.

Several of the White People in the RaceFail discussion have said something like: "So, now I'm expected to write multiculturally, and if I get it wrong in any tiny way, I can expect to be crucified for it. The hell with this -- I'm sticking with white characters only from now on!" I can see where this comes from: sins of omission are easier to live with than sins of commission (I think it was Mark Twain who said, "it's better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you're a fool than open it and remove all doubt"). But I don't buy into this. Racism is a problem, and by consciously avoiding dealing with it, you shift yourself towards the part of the problem end of the problem/solution continuum. By choosing to address the issue, you're adding to the discussion, and pushing in the right direction.

And it's important to realize that it doesn't have to be perfect. Striving for perfection is a good way to do nothing at all; it's paralyzing. Most books on the craft of writing have an entire chapter about how poisonous perfectionism can be. So my target is to write well and consciously work to avoid negative cultural biases to the best of my ability. Personally, I use the U.S.S. Enterprise as my gold standard. Looking back on it through a modern, politically-correct lens, the original Star Trek series seems like a mess of ethnic stereotypes and tokenism. But it was a huge step forward for television; in a lot of ways, it redefined how race and culture could work on television. If I can do half as well in my writing in my time, as Gene Roddenberry did for his time, I can live with that, even if it occasionally pisses people off. And I hope my readers will be able to live with it as well.

Major Existential Question

2009-04-01T10:17:00.000-04:00

It's important to ponder the important questions, the big ones that define us as people and help us find our place in the world. What do we think happens when we die? Do we believe in god? Does individual freedom trump our responsibility to others? Actually, I've got these three figured out. So now I'm working on another of the big ones:

What's my ideal karaoke song?

I've never done karaoke, but it's still an important question. So far, I'm leaning towards Rod Stewart's "Do You Think I'm Sexy?"; it's got the right combination of disco vibe, inadvertently funny lyrics, and memorable, easily-imitable video. It would let me do the goofy dance, and I could play it either straight or wacky, depending on my mood. The only prop I'd need would be a scarf.

What do you think -- any better suggestions? And, what's your ideal karaoke song?

Theater on a shoestring

2009-04-01T07:41:00.000-04:00

One of the things that worries me about our current soon-to-be economic depression is that it might kill big chunks of the theater community. Theater survives on love as much as money; it works because every single person involved is willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen. Already in the last few years, I've seen performing companies take hits, but the only people who are readily aware of it are the people doing the actual work. One company I know of has had their traditional four days of in-theater tech and rehearsal time turn into two days, then into one day. The show still happens, and the audiences would never know the difference, but the process has gotten stressful and painful for the people doing the work. It's the way of life in the theater -- the show must go on, at any personal cost to the people involved. Staff and performers and volunteers do things that would be considered insane in nearly any other endeavor, putting forth tremendous, often last-minute efforts to make the show happen. We mostly started learning this in school, where tech weeks were extreme and stressful, and the show always somehow managed to happen in spite of it all. And it continued into our professional careers, the vaguely seat-of-the-pants vibe that all shows seem to have.

But it's been this way for so long -- staff and performers and volunteers doing excellent work under extreme stress -- that it's become almost the normal operating mode for the performing arts. The people at the top of the biz (as a friend of mine says, "the people who shower before work, rather than after") don't realize how much coping happens in the trenches, how tight things truly are for the people doing the work. So they keep cutting, because it never seems to matter; they cut, and the show seems to go on regardless.

And this is the reason why theater is in a position where it will take a heavy hit in the economic downturn. It's already stretched and stressed to a degree that most industries couldn't survive. I've already seen little instances of people leaving the biz, or curtailing their involvement, because the stress finally surpassed the payoff. And I know a distressing number of serious professionals in the field who are looking for a way to get out, searching for some other job that pays better and provides more security with less constant stress and more respect.

And none of these are high hurdles. Better pay is easy; fast food would be a lateral move for the majority of people in the performing arts. Security is a hard thing to come by these days, but the arts have even less than the norm; a lot of jobs are seasonal contracts, so it's not a matter of keeping your job, it's a matter of hoping to get re-hired for it, season to season. Stress is everywhere, too, but I suspect theater is worse than most, the stress of short-term, hard-deadline, improvisational work with demanding, occasionally neurotic management, repeating itself with every new show. And respect is its own issue; between often top-heavy management cutting budgets and schedules from the bottom, and decreasing audiences, it's easy to feel thankless and unappreciated.

When the people that make the magic happen start leaving, it's going to get that much harder for the people remaining. And the snowball effect might even overbalance the constant influx of new people who love the performing arts so much, they're willing to do the stressful work for the low pay. So far, the most troubled theater and performing companies seem to be getting hit from the top; when a company folds, it's because expense and debt have outpaced income. But I don't think it'll be long until we see companies drying up from the bottom, when there aren't enough dedicated people to produce quality shows that attract audiences and donors. From the outside, and probably from the front office, it'll look the same -- not enough money to keep the doors open. But the money will be a symptom, not the cause....

Playing with my food

2009-03-28T18:34:00.006-04:00

One of the rarely-mentioned joys of being a married guy is that you've always got a wife waiting to be appalled by what you eat. Laura has a show tonight, so for dinner I did some experimentation with food in a blender. First experiment: half a can of white-meat chicken, 3/4 cup of nonfat yogurt, and a teaspoon of crushed garlic. Surprisingly not bad; a bit like evil tzatziki. It went well with pita. And, second experiment: the other half of the can of chicken, 3/4 cup of low-fat cottage cheese, a little milk, and some black pepper. Also better than expected. I heated it in the microwave and ate it with tortilla chips, and it wasn't half bad. Both of these are quick, easy, and high in protein -- almost 60 grams in both experiments. And both invoked retching sounds from Laura.

I suspect that one of the reasons I liked the meat in a blender is that my standards for high-protein blender foods are very low. I'll have the occasional protein shake on mornings when I'm planning on heavy exercise, and this stuff is awful. I keep experimenting with it to see if I can improve the taste, but I haven't had any luck. My best bet is to just mix skim milk and chocolate-flavored protein powder, then drink it quickly to get it over with.

And, I was curious to know if I'm the first person to ever use the phrase "evil tzatziki". Google says no; 212 hits. While I'm googling, I also found 238 instances of "cat bidet," one hit for "electrified shingles," and 4 hits for "anti-pigeon artillery". It's a weird world we live in.

Speaking of inappropriate things in a blender: if you haven't seen the Will It Blend? guy, you need to check him out. He's the amusing kind of crazy.

An old joke, but still funny

2009-03-23T16:14:00.001-04:00

English majors have gotten this line before, but it's still funny to see in webcomic form.

My personal experience has been that an English degree has exactly as much value as any other liberal arts degree, which is: letters after your name. I've had a few jobs for which it mattered that I had a college degree, but it didn't really matter which degree. At least with a liberal arts degree, it's less important that I have any particular skills imparted by my years in school, because I didn't learn many. The sum total of the practical skills I picked up in my four years as an English major came from one single copy-editing class, and I've never needed these skills for a job. But a lot of jobs have wanted me to hold a degree.

I think it's mostly a matter of job-application triage. For any decent job, employers have at least a few dozen times more applicants than openings available. Being able to instantly limit that stack of applications by culling the ones without a degree, or without a specific amount of experience, or whatever arbitrary hoops you set, simplifies the hiring process. It doesn't matter if the job requires a college-specific skill set; it doesn't matter if the job is learn-as-you-go, and therefore requires no real experience. If you can simplify your hiring process, you're happier. And, you're shifting the boundary upward -- you're selecting for applicants more qualified than you actually need. This seems like a good thing, but it isn't necessarily. If your applicants are truly overqualified and savvy enough to know it, they'll be looking elsewhere. And you're cutting yourself off from the people who meet the real needs of the job but don't meet the artificial hiring standards you've put in place. The best fit for the job won't even get an interview.

Which is its own problem. The person who'll do best at the interview process is probably, in aggregate, not be the best person for the job. You're hiring a person based on job-interview skills, not job-performance skills. It's a slightly more human version of hiring someone based on whose resume is neatest. The best-presented, smoothest-talking applicant isn't necessarily the one with the most substance. The interview system works best if you're hiring someone for a sales or management job, where performance skills and interview skills have significant overlap. But if you're hiring a computer programmer or a theater tech, you're trying to pick winners based on irrelevant data....

This topic is on my mind for two reasons. First, I know a lot of people looking for work, and I've been thinking them positive thoughts. The job market is hard now, both because so few people are hiring, and because for any open jobs you're competing with a much larger number of qualified applicants who have recently found themselves out of work. Freelancers have the same problem; when you're bidding for that plumbing job, you're now competing with a hundred other guys, all recently laid off from big homebuilders, all willing to work for less (sometimes much less) than the going rate, just to have the work. Times are tough, and I'm not seeing an end.

Second, we spent a frustrating two hours at the AT&T store today trying to cancel our cell-phone service at work, being tormented by a perky but clueless and utterly unhelpful salesman. And I kept thinking, "you beat out how many other applicants for this job?!?"

Just like a real SWAT team!

2009-03-21T16:59:00.002-04:00

My favorite video game of the last few months has been SWAT 3. It's a tactical team shooter, and it's been around long enough that people have made a heap of mods and missions for it. It was released in 2001, and I found it on the $10 discount rack at Fry's just before Christmas; it's old, but new to me. The main perk of an older computer is that I can buy software cheap. My hardware is too old to run any game released in the last three years or so, so any new games I want to pick up are highly inexpensive.

SWAT 3 is a blast so far; I haven't finished it, mostly because I can only play a few minutes before a voice in the back of my head starts screaming, "you should be writing!", loudly enough that it starts messing with the game's incoming radio calls. This is new for me. Once upon a time, when I got a new game I'd play it constantly, finishing it in a day or two, or two weeks at most. Now, I play for a bit of relaxation or simulated action and adventure; I don't feel the compulsive need to Beat The Game that I once did.

And some of the missions are tough, which means I have to replay them a lot to get through them. The bad guys are smart and sneaky, and better armed than me. And they don't have to worry about hitting hostages. I'm just playing to finish the missions in order; I don't pay much attention to the scoring. The game has a weird points system, and a low score doesn't affect gameplay. But I just discovered a sort-of hack for the game. One of the things that counts against your score is erroneous radio calls. If you report a hostage as cooperative but they're not, or if you report a downed enemy as wounded rather than dead, you lose points. But I don't think you lose points for shooting a downed, wounded enemy. So once they're down you can shoot them again, then report them as dead, rather than watching to see if they're wounded. It's a bit evil, but I suspect actual SWAT cops do it occasionally.

And, I have to share the mission description of the mission I just finished:

Rapid deployment of tactical personnel is required to quell heavily armed, highly disgruntled auto body employees. Employees of Heather's Euro-Asian Imports have taken up arms and are strong holding the shop in an apparent protest over the break down of labor negotiations. Employees have refused to negotiate their demands: free soda pop, pizza Fridays, stock options, four weeks vacation, private office (with window), signing bonuses, and dogs allowed at work. Going tactical is the only option at this time.

This made me laugh. This kind of thing is another reason to play well-written video games. The Splinter Cell games were also laden with low-key funny moments....

Nice while it lasted.

2009-03-20T16:26:00.002-04:00

Plus side: I've got my Saturn back! Wheels!

Down side: I had it for just over 24 hours before something else went wrong with it.

Monday, I get to take it back to the shop, where they'll replace the alternator. I'm less grouchy about this than I would've expected; I've taken an almost fatalistic approach to the car. When the battery light came on last night on the way home from dinner, I wasn't angry or upset. Nor was I particularly shocked. My reaction was more akin to, "what else is new?".

With luck, I'll get it back in less than two years this time.

Lunch Math

2009-03-20T12:31:00.001-04:00

I'm on a quest to eat cheaply at work. It's not easy, especially if you eat out. A complete lunch (food + side + drink) costs anywhere from $6 at Arby's or Taco Bell or Subway, to $8 at most of the food court at the mall, to $10 at King David's Dogs or Dick's Bodacious Barbecue. For only a few dollars more, you can spend $13 or $14 and eat well at Rock Bottom or Weber Grill, but I don't do this; I can much more easily justify two $6 meals at Subway than one $12 meal at Weber.

Packing a lunch is cheap in direct relation to how homemade it is. Peanut butter and jelly: about 70 cents per sandwich. Balogna and cheese is about the same, depending on how refined your taste in lunchmeat is and how thick you stack it. Homemade chili: about $1.80 per serving, the way I make it. Homemade chicken noodle soup: around $1.60 per serving. Any prepackaged lunch food starts at a dime for a package of ramen, jumps quickly to a dollar for Kraft Easy Mac (which isn't a complete meal), and gets more expensive pretty quickly. Frozen entrees range from a dollar for bulk Banquet budget meals, to four or five dollars for the healthier choices.

What I really need to watch for is snack food. It's easy to wander into Au Bon Pain or the South Bend Chocolate Company and spend five or six dollars on a mocha and a scone, or coffee and cookies and hard-boiled eggs. And this is food I should be avoiding anyway. Bringing snacks from home is cheaper, but not necessarily a lot cheaper; bars of any sort (PowerBars, MetRX protein bars, CLIF bars...) are a healthy snack, but also an expensive way to eat. On the other hand, unhealthy snack food is pretty cheap if purchased in bulk and eaten a serving at a time; a double handful of chips costs around 50 cents, and pretzels are about the same. My problem is that I'm prone to cranking through a bag of corn chips in a sitting, instead of stopping after a serving. This adds unhealthy to expensive; if I make a mess while I'm doing it, I hit the Fritos Trifecta.

I've recently discovered the cheapest possible meal downtown. I've got an Einstein's Bagels travel mug, so a coffee refill only costs 99 cents. And bagels are also 99 cents, with nothing on them. So I'll get a cup of coffee and a cinnamon-sugar bagel (if you ask nice, they'll put the cinnamon and sugar on the inside, too) for $2.08 including tax. Sure, it's carb-intensive with almost no protein. But it's also a $2 lunch; it's hard to beat that.

Enough rambling about food; time for my $2 Einstein's lunch!

The Saturn is back!

2009-03-18T12:51:00.002-04:00

I go tonight to pick up my car! It's been over two years since it was in working order, so this is how long we've been a one-car family. Or, a one-Jeep, one-bicycle family. I'm not sure how much I'll drive; I like the bike and I like the exercise. And, I even enjoy the attenuation of options. When you've got a car, you can go anywhere and do anything! On a bike, you can go anywhere within five or ten miles, assuming you don't need to carry anything heavy with you, also assuming you can chart a bike-friendly path between here and there. For instance, I never get up to Fry's Electronics; it's a long ride on a lot of extremely bike-unfriendly streets. But, really, I'm fine with this. I don't need to torture myself by window-shopping for electronics I can't afford. As long as Laura and/or I can take the Jeep to pick up cat food and major groceries, I don't mind having my options limited. So having a car but mostly riding the bike might be ideal; I can go the distance if I need to, but I'll spend most of my time on the bike.

In theory. We'll see how that works out when I've got a car, and the bike is suddenly an option instead of a necessity....

Priorities: do I need a phone?

2009-03-18T12:11:00.001-04:00

As part of our budget cuts at work, I'm losing my cell phone. I've enjoyed having a phone for which I didn't have to pay; limiting my personal calls on it was a small price to pay. Before my phone goes away at the end of the month, I need to make a decision about what to replace it with. On the extremely cool side, an iPhone would be nice; it's also got the added advantage that, if I take over the number and change service, the company won't have to pay the early cancellation fee ($175) for ditching our phones before the contract ends (this is true if I get any AT&T phone, not just an iPhone). On the down side, I can afford neither the phone nor the minimum monthly service plan. In the middle, every cellular carrier charges roughly $50/month for a plan with text messaging and a minimum number of talk minutes. On the cheap end, prepaid wireless can be as cheap as $30 a month, with text messaging; Virgin Wireless seems to be the best deal with coverage in Indy.

But $30 a month still seems a bit expensive. I'm considering going with Option Z: ditching my phone altogether. I'm trying to decide how necessary a cell phone is these days. It's useful, certainly. It's convenient. But is it mandatory, in 2009, to have a phone with me at all times? I don't have an answer for that; I don't know when extreme convenience transitions into actual necessity. I suspect a bigger problem than my personal need for a phone, would be the fact that everyone else expects me to have a phone. It's tempting to go phoneless for a while, just to see how much trouble it is....

How to tell I'm possibly in a bad mood, St. Pat's Day edition

2009-03-17T13:34:00.001-04:00

A friend today commented that he was surprised to see me wearing green for Saint Patrick's Day, given that I generally don't jump on this kind of bandwagon. I replied that it was actually to keep me out of jail; if I didn't wear green, there's a moderate chance that some random stranger would pinch me for not wearing green. Then I'd have to put him on the ground and break all of his fingers, which might land me in legal trouble.

I'm not entirely sure I was kidding about this, but it did get a laugh....

What he said.

2009-03-16T21:17:00.003-04:00

Every so often, I'll read something that exactly sums up my feelings on a subject. I just found another one of these, an article by Philip Howard in the Wall Street Journal about how law is killing the American spirit. It's a good read. So go read it now!

It's easy to bash lawyers; they've got even more jokes than musicians (how can you tell there's a singer on your front porch? He can't find the key and doesn't know when to come in!). But this is a legitimate criticism of the general approach to the law in this country, and very well said. The horrible thing about this is, it's a change that can't be reversed. Too many people with too much power would stand to lose too much. And it's a self-generating problem -- law breeds more law, not less.

It's the same reason we won't see real public health care here: too many extremely powerful people would lose too much, and they won't let it happen. Maybe if we get real lobbying reforms to kill the influence of the insurance, medical, and pharmaceutical lobbies, we'll be able to make a start. But it's not going to happen on any reasonable timetable (like, before I hit retirement age).

The new, low standard for housekeeping

2009-03-13T07:11:00.002-04:00

By the time Laura gets home tomorrow, she will have been gone for three weeks. That's long enough that it's giving me a glimpse of what my lifestyle would be like if I were left to my own devices. A single week isn't long enough to tell. If she's out of town for a week, for instance, I won't do laundry when she's gone. I will have generally done a bunch of pre-departure packing laundry, and I won't need to wash anything for at least a week. But in three weeks, I'm noticing that I determine my wardrobe choices based on what will let me avoid laundry for a few more days. Ditto, housekeeping. After a week, I'm still keeping to Laura standards of cleanliness. But in three weeks, I've got enough time that my standards start showing. And they're low. It turns out that, left on my own, I've got a fairly high tolerance for dirt. Since Laura left, I've made chili, mac-n-cheese, several varieties of beans-n-rice, and a host of breakfast foods at all hours of the day, but I haven't cleaned the stove yet. The splotched tomato sauce and that one piece of macaroni baked onto the stovetop aren't messing with my sense of order, except for the lingering I'll-have-to-clean-that-up-before-Laura-gets-home vibe. I'm not a complete slob; I keep up with about half of the housework. But I've completely ignored the other half. I'm still religious about vacuuming the kitty hair from the carpets, for instance, but I haven't cleaned the sink. I don't let dirty dishes pile up, but I haven't changed the sheets on the bed. I'm religious about cleaning the cats' litter boxes, but I haven't washed the towels. I water the plants every three days, but I haven't dusted. I'm good about taking care of anything that looks like maintenance, like changing light bulbs. But I haven't put any of the newspapers in the recycle bin.

All this means that I've got to do a lot of housework before I pick Laura up at the airport tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Phantom Beeping Saves My Brownies

2009-03-11T21:35:00.002-04:00

I made dark-chocolate brownies tonight with chocolate chips. I popped them in the oven, then crashed on the couch to read until the oven timer went off. A few chapters later, I heard the beeping and went to get them out of the oven. They were done perfectly, the brownies just starting to pull away from the edge of the pan. Then I looked up at the oven clock and saw the original baking time blinking away, 45:00. The timer doesn't reset when it goes off; it switches back to the clock. This means I never started the timer, which means it didn't beep in the real world, only in my head. I wish I thought this was cool -- that the back of my brain has a perfect brownie timer built into it (or maybe I have a baking fairy). But, honestly, I'm more concerned that my subconscious is capable of producing high-quality auditory hallucinations....

BTW, the brownies rock. Here's the recipe:

1. Buy a package of Ghirardelli Dark Chocolate Brownie Mix

2. Prepare according to package directions

Complicated, I know, but I've got it committed to memory already -- yet another impressive thing my brain can do.

Apparently, I can snort cocaine now.

2009-03-09T21:48:00.001-04:00

One of the signs of a frequent blood donor is that you recognize when they change the verbiage on the health-screening questionnaire you fill out before you donate. I've got a slight edge in that I donate platelets; you can do it every two weeks, rather than every eight, so I fill out the form more than a whole-blood donor ever would. They make little changes every few months, but near the start of this year, they reworked the entire questionnaire. They removed the question about whether I had snorted cocaine through the nose, for one thing; cocaine usage is no longer an automatic deferral. They've also become concerned in greater detail about transplants. Instead of a single question, cornea transplants, organ transplants, and bone transplants now have their own questions. They also now care if I've had an endoscopic biopsy. But they no longer care if I'm taking any medications, as long as they're not on the short deferral list they hand you with the questionnaire. And cocaine isn't on it. So, on the off chance I decide to add to my lengthy list of vices, it's good to know that snorting coke won't interfere with my regular altruistic blood-product donations.

It's been interesting seeing the questionnaire change over time. I can date fairly accurately when the blood bank became concerned about mad cow disease -- it's when they added questions about travel to the UK. A year later, the question expanded to cover all of Europe, when they first found BSE in France. And, because tattoos are so extremely common these days, they also expanded the tattoo question. It used to be one big catch-all question: "In the last twelve months, have you had a tattoo, ear or skin piercing, accidental needle stick, or come into contact with someone else's blood?" Now body piercing, needle sticks, and strange blood each have their own questions. And if you check the YES box to the tattoo question, there's a subset of questions about whether it was at a regulated tattoo parlor, or at a tattoo party (tattoo party? I feel extremely unhip, that I've never heard of this before), whether they used sterile equipment, and whether they used single-use disposable supplies. They've also fiddled with the wording of the armed forces question. They want to know if you've been in the armed forces, are a civilian military contractor, or if you're a dependent of a member of the military. I'm not sure why they need to know this; the paranoid part of my brain wonders what the blood bank knows that the rest of us don't.

Maybe the biggest change they made was a few years ago, when they started allowing us to fill out the questionnaire on our own. Previously, a staff member asked us the sensitive questions aloud; it was odd, having a grandmotherly septuagenarian ask me if I had ever given money or drugs for sex (snide answer: "does extreme begging count?"), or if I had ever accepted any sort of payment for sex (snide answer: "does dinner and a movie count?"). It was a welcome change, being able to fill out the answers on my own.

One change that still needs to be made: the consent form on the front of the page. They describe the procedure in detail ("...after which a sterile needle will be inserted into an arm and approximately 500ml of whole blood will be..."), but the procedure they describe is for a whole blood donation. Those of us who donate platelets are, technically, signing a consent form for a procedure they never perform, and are having a procedure done for which we haven't given legal consent. I'm surprised nobody's ever called them on this.

BTW, I had asked about the cocaine question -- did they care if I had smoked crack or injected cocaine, or was it only snorting coke? They told me that it's not about the drug itself, but that snorting coke radically increases the chance that you've got hepatitis. Injecting cocaine is covered by another question: "Have you ever, even once, used a needle to take drugs that were not prescribed to you by a doctor?" But smoking crack is apparently fine, as long as you've never traded it for sex....

-ine words

2009-03-09T15:45:00.004-04:00

One of my low-grade language fascinations is animal adjectives that end in -ine. We all know canine, feline, and bovine, and probably a few others as well, but much rarer are words like vermine (wormlike) or acarine (relating to mites). I've been keeping a list for years, and whenever I encounter a new one, I add it to the list. So, in the interest of sharing too much, here's my incomplete, non-canonical list of all the animal -ine words, and the animals they refer to:

acarine: mite
anguine: snake
anserine: goose
apian: bee
aquiline: eagle
asinine: donkey
avian: bird
bovine: cow
canine: dog
caprine: goat
cervine: deer
chelonian: turtle
corvine: crow
croataline: rattlesnake
discophoran: jellyfish
equine: horse
feline: cat
hircine: goat
larine: gull
leonine: lion
leporine: rabbit
lupine: wolf
murine: mouse
musteline: weasel
ophidian: snake
oscine: songbird
otarine: seal
ovine: sheep
passerine: songbird
pavonine: peacock
pelargic: stork
phocine: seal
piscine: fish
porcine: pig
ranine: frog
selachian: shark
simian: monkey
taurine: bull
testudine: tortoise
ursine: bear
vermine: worm
vespine: wasp
vituline: calf
viverine: civet cat
vulpine: fox

There are a host of others, too -- you can take almost any taxonomic genus and attach an -ine suffix to it. But these are the ones I've seen used by people who aren't biologists. Am I missing any obvious ones?

Profit and Loss and Scalability

2009-03-07T16:49:00.002-05:00

The economy's tanking over the last year and a half has opened my eyes a bit to the way businesses earn profit. I had never put any thought into it, and had never realized how fragile the state of profitability is. I had been assuming that if your sales fell by half, your profits also fell by half; this is so blatantly untrue that I feel a bit stupid for ever thinking it. I had never realized how many businesses work with extremely narrow margins of profitability. As an example, I talked recently with the manager of a car-rental company, and he said their profitability point was when they had 92% of their cars rented. If they had a hundred cars in their inventory, and they had eight sitting on the lot unused, they were breaking even; if they had twenty cars on the lot, they were hemorrhaging money.

I think my problem was that I had spent too much time listening to business statistics. When you hear that Amalgamated Widgets makes ten dollars on every widget they sell, that's (probably) true, but it's also misleading -- it's got a host of unspoken assumptions behind it, the biggest being "...assuming we sell a million widgets this year". The ten-dollar figure is net profit, after paying all fixed and per-unit costs, and a lot of it is dependent on scale. The material cost of making a widget even varies with scale; if you buy your widget grommets in lots of a hundred, you're paying more per grommet than if you bought them in cases of ten thousand. And you need a guy manning the widget press, the widget amalgamator, the widget demagnetizer, and the widget wrapper, whether they're making a hundred an hour or five an hour; your labor cost per widget is cheaper if you make more of them.

Your fixed business costs (electricity and water and rent and insurance and admin staff -- any cost not immediately dependent on production) also weigh more heavily on your profit the fewer you sell; if you sell fewer widgets, each widget bears a proportionally greater portion of the fixed costs. If your insurance is a thousand dollars a month, and you sell a thousand widgets, a dollar of each widget's sale price goes towards insurance; if you only sell five hundred widgets, insurance now eats two dollars of the price of each widget sold.

All this is a long way of saying that I had never connected exactly how major a 3% drop in sales can be. It makes the economic outlook seem even more intimidating....

Staying inside now!

2009-03-07T09:55:00.002-05:00

It's a gorgeous day outside: windy, but 65 degrees and sunny. And I decided a walk around the park would be fun. So I put on walk-appropriate clothing and had just stepped out the front door when I heard gunshots from somewhere down the block.

Suddenly it seems like a good time to stay inside and not go for a walk. Maybe I'll read a book or listen for sirens....

dessert meals

2009-03-04T19:43:00.001-05:00

One of my usual Laura-out-of-town traditions has fallen by the wayside recently. I used to always begin my "bachelor week" with an extremely unhealthy meal involving edibles that are occasionally hard to quantify by food group: Spaghetti-O's, SweetTarts, fish sticks, hint o' crack, things like that. I don't do this anymore. Partially, I've started practicing my cooking skills while Laura's away. But mostly, I just don't feel well after I eat too much unhealthy food in one sitting. Another sign of aging, I guess. I mention this because dinner tonight consists of a Hagen-Dazs shake and some Toll House cookies from our closest neighbor in the mall, but it's a special occasion: I feel like a treat, and I found out I'm working a 12-hour day to fill in for someone who called in sick. So this is a combination comfort food and splurge meal of the week.

But this is far from the worst I've ever eaten. My record bad-for-you meal came years ago, when I was working in the scene shop of a summer stock theater. The scenery crew decided to splurge and go to Ponderosa Steakhouse for their all-you-can-eat everything buffet; ten bucks got you a bad steak, plus unlimited access to their pasta, soup, side-dish, salad, potato, and dessert bars. Or, you could skip the steak and just get the all-you-can-eat everything for six dollars. On our way in, I asked the cashier how much it would cost for just the dessert bar. He said nobody had ever asked him that before, so he didn't know; he guessed a dollar, since there were six bars, and it was six bucks for all of them. A dollar! For all-you-can-eat dessert! We thought this was such a great deal, we all did it. Lunch consisted of bowls of chocolate chips with whipped cream and hot fudge. Tureens of ice cream with crumbled Oreo cookies and peanut topping. Brownies with ice cream and strawberry sauce. I suspect we tried every possible combination of everything on the dessert bar. And we felt great, for about an hour. When the inevitable sugar crash hit, it hit like a sledgehammer. The tech director ended up closing the shop early, because we were all to wiped out to work.

And that's another thing I can't do anymore: all-you-can-eat restaurants. When I was in college, I'd go to Duff's with a few friends, and the place would actively lose money until we left. I'd fill a plate, polish it off, and go back for seconds. And thirds. And fourths and fifths and sixths. We'd stay for hours, talking and eating constantly, and we'd generally leave when we were bored rather than full. I can't do this anymore. The last time I went to a stuff-yourself-silly buffet, I had a plateful of food and one dessert, and I was done. I've turned into such a lightweight that when Laura and I go to Weber Grill, we'll typically get a burger and fries and split it. This is probably a good thing; I don't think I could afford to eat like I did when I was twenty....

Meet The Artist

2009-03-04T17:24:00.002-05:00

The current visual art exhibit in the Artsgarden is by local painter Douglas David. He's a rarity for an artist: he's organized. I have no idea how this happened; it's a rare enough trait amongst artists that it makes him nearly unique. He arrived with a precise number of paintings (120), and an exact plan for how he wanted each displayed in the cases. And they arrived in order. Really, I'm impressed. Normally, on the morning of their load-in artists can't even tell us how many works they brought with them. So it's a treat to work with someone who's nice, organized, and efficient.

And, I like his work. This exhibit is a collection of 3" X 5" original oil paintings that recreate things he saw on his recent Creative Renewal trip to Europe, and I like the style. Evocative, painterly, recognizable -- fun little works, and lots of them. We're having an unofficial opening for the exhibit in the Artsgarden this Friday, 5 to 8; if you'd like to meet the artist, this is your convenient chance.

Also of note, he's got close to the perfect artist's website. It displays a good variety of his work, it's nicely organized, and it's friendly and pleasant to look at. And, while it's a sales tool, it's subtle about it; if you want to buy something, it'll help, but it doesn't annoyingly scream BUY BUY BUY! the way some artists' websites do.

Non-spousally-approved food

2009-03-02T12:48:00.001-05:00

When Laura's gone, I make a point of buying non-Laura-approved foods. This time, the day she left I picked up a tub of Cool Whip. I used to love Cool Whip. It was one of my universal foods; I'd make Cool Whip sandwich cookies, pile it on ice cream, dip fruit and vegetables in it. And I just realized that I don't care much for it anymore. This might be Laura's influence. In my pre-Laura days, my choices were Cool Whip and Redi-Whip in the spray can. My preference depended on what I was doing with it; Cool Whip was better for dipping and for cookie sandwiches, but Redi Whip was better for ice cream (plus, Redi-Whip is a member of the Fun Aerosol Foods category, along with spray cheez).

But Laura introduced me to real whipped cream, the kind you make by starting with whipping cream (go figure) and whipping it (go figure). And it's so easy to make -- just dump some cream in the Kitchen Aid, maybe add a little sugar and vanilla, and turn it on. Come back in five minutes, and you've got real whipped cream. The problem is, it doesn't keep well. So whenever you make some, you need to either use it all for the ice cream or pie or whatever, or you need to eat the leftovers with a spoon within an hour or two. I'm using the word "problem" lightly here; being forced to either heap extra whipped cream on your dessert, or to eat leftover whipped cream with a spoon, isn't really traumatic.

Minor culinary modifications

2009-03-01T16:19:00.001-05:00

When Laura's out of town, I tend to eat simply. But I also generally avoid pre-packaged meals. So one of my meal archetypes is "packaged food, slightly modified". Tuesday was Vigo black beans and rice, to which I added a pound of turkey sausage (next time, I'm adding lime juice too). Thursday: Kraft mac and cheese, modified with a can of tuna, a can of peas, and some tabasco sauce. This is all pretty basic stuff, quick and easy to prepare and clean up after. And it all seems to make intuitive sense; none of it's too daring. It helps that I've got Laura a phone call away to help me with cooking decisions that require actual taste. Last night I made Vigo red beans and rice and added sauteed chicken breasts. But I had to call Laura for sauteeing advice. Paprika, pepper, and red wine vinegar sounded good, and she agreed. But I need to ask, because apricot preserves and orange juice also sounded good to me.

Tonight, another experimental recipe: chili, but with ground turkey and turkey sausage instead of beef or pork. It's a lot like my Chili With Buffy recipe, with the meat substitution and no green peppers. And no Buffy.

Bicycles that rock

2009-02-28T19:18:00.003-05:00

I spent today at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show. I wish I would've thought to take my camera; I saw a lot of stuff I wish I had a picture of. Clever designs, new ways to bolt things to a bike, stylized specialty bikes, wood-grain finishes (and, in at least one case, bicycle parts made from wood), new technology: it's amazing how many cool things you can do with a bike and bicycle equipment.

It was also surprising how few people do cool things. I probably saw a hundred road bikes that were essentially identical. I suspect this is because the wildly different designs for road bikes have had decades to converge on a few very efficient design principles. Racing bike frames are all straight, not curved, because straight works better. They don't use grip shifters, because grip shifters give you less control and determine where you need to put your hands. Triathlon bikes all use aerobars, because they're the most aerodynamic option. Racing spokes are flat, rather than round, because it cuts air resistance. So it's only natural that road bikes are much more similar than they are different. Still, I was a little surprised at how little variation there was in a lot of the handmade custom bikes.

Because it's what I do, I looked at a lot of commuter bikes. I pretended I was in the market for a new extremely expensive bike, and tried to pick a bike. And I didn't find my perfect bike, no matter the price range. Admittedly, my criteria were complex: geared for speed; fenders; generator for lights; comfortable grips; good shifters; good frame geometry; durable tires; rear rack; disc brakes, nice but optional. But, still -- an entire bike show packed with custom bikes, and I didn't find a must-have in the bunch, even if I were in the market. I'd still buy an off-the-rack Soho before I'd dive at any of the ones I saw today. That said, some of the people who finished and painted the bikes were world-class. If I did buy that Soho, I'd want to have it repainted by some of the people at the show.

I did see some cool accessories, too. I was impressed with a bike-commuter backpack from Ergon. Some people had cool messenger bags, but they're mostly about the cool, not the practical. A real backpack is a superior choice for commuting, largely because it stays in place and you never need to think about it. I also saw a gyroscopic travel-mug holder for mounting on bike handlebars, and I'm kicking myself for not writing down the manufacturer. It wasn't for sale, but one of the bikes had one mounted. Also from Ergon, comfy grips -- but I can't use them with the grip shifters on my Navigator. And I saw a handlebar rack specifically designed to hold two bottles of wine.

I was also surprised that nobody was selling cool snarky cycling shirts, like GenCon people sell gaming shirts.

And, cycling-related: I like this picture (subtitled "after 16 days of ice and snow, we'd forgotten how to ride") from one of the regular commentors at commutebybike.com.

Meet the artist

2009-02-25T13:32:00.002-05:00

I know this is short notice, but artist Fred Wilson is talking tonight at the Madame Walker Theatre in downtown Indy. He's considering a public art project, and his previous work is interesting. I'm curious to hear him talk; he seems interesting and genuine, and I'm curious to hear what he has to say. He starts talking at 6pm at the Walker (617 Indiana Avenue).

I spend a lot of time being the nerd who runs the projector for this sort of thing, but I'm actually curious to hear him talk as well. I'm not even bringing a book.

Nu Kitteh: Bowie

2009-02-25T03:05:00.004-05:00

We've recruited another cat into the house. Or, more accurately, an illegal-immigrant cat who kept sneaking across our poorly-guarded border has been granted resident status. Her name's Bowie, named after David because her eyes don't match. She loves being picked up and held. And she's a good lap cat, better for task-oriented laps than any of our other cats. She's completely content to just curl up and purr; she doesn't feel the need to squirm her way under your hands while you're trying to type or read.

On the down side, she pushes our indoor-cat count to five, which breaks our original cats-to-humans ratio limit, but we're happy with her. Five has to be our hard limit, though -- we're already on the verge of being Crazy Cat People....

Here's Bowie, in Laura's arms:

The Pain Scale

2009-02-24T16:19:00.000-05:00

I went to a chiropractor yesterday to see if he could help with my persistent backache. Yes, it turns out; the doc at Mass Ave Chiropractic is very good at what he does. I'm wishing I would've done this two months ago, instead of waiting to see if it got better on its own. If you're looking for a good chiropractor downtown, I would highly recommend Dr. Keilur.

As all doctors do, he asked me the strange question: on a scale from one to ten, how much does it hurt? This always bothers me, because it's such a relative scale. A few years ago, I had a roto-tiller accident. Not the serious kind -- I hit a drainpipe underground, and the machine kicked sideways and mashed my hand into a wall. I lost a fingernail, and the doc at MedCheck picked debris off of the raw nail bed, then spent thirty seconds scrubbing it with a brush. This was probably the longest half-minute of my life; I wouldn't have thought it was possible for anything to be as urgently painful as this disinterested doctor scrubbing at the raw flesh where my fingernail used to be. I didn't realize until he was done that I was clenching my jaw, and I was clenching so hard that my jaw muscles had cramped. On the one-to-ten scale, this was probably only a nine; I could see it being worse. And, relative to that, I had a third-degree burn that was only a seven. I've had fifty or so stitches in my life, and none of the injuries that caused the wounds was more than a five. So describing back pain as a two or three is accurate, but probably doesn't convey how much my back is bothering me.

I also think there's another factor with back pain that's not covered by the pain scale. I'll call it the Annoyance Factor. Think about allergies and chronic tinnitus (ringing in the ears). Both rank a dead zero on the pain scale; they don't hurt. But they can keep you awake, distract you, and ruin your concentration, and both can seriously interfere with your daily life. They've got a high Annoyance Factor without pain. Back injuries are much the same. It doesn't need to hurt a lot to have a high Annoyance Factor, if it hurts every time you turn your head, or if it keeps you from sleeping, or if you can't reach over your head without wincing and groaning. I once needed twelve stitches on my leg from a machete injury (this is much less cool and macho than it sounds, trust me), but it had a relatively low annoyance factor. I also once needed two stitches on the tip of the thumb on my dominant hand from a frozen pot-pie injury (this one is exactly as stupid as it sounds), and this had a very high annoyance factor; it affected everything from writing to driving to brushing my teeth. There needs to be a separate scale for the Annoyance Factor. Maybe the doctor can add the two together and use the aggregate to determine treatment, instead of relying strictly on a very subjective measurement of physical pain. Then again, just as some people have a high tolerance for pain, I'm sure some people have much more tolerance for lifestyle-altering constant irritation. It's still all subjective.

And, I want to be clear that that this wasn't an issue with Dr. Keilur; I'm not complaining about him at all. His concern was much more with the limitations my back was placing on my activities, than with the arbitrary number on the pain chart. I recommend him highly.

The Valentine's Day Tree

2009-02-22T14:03:00.000-05:00

I feel a bit bad admitting this, but Laura and I took down our ~~Christmas~~ ~~New Year's~~ ~~MLK Day~~ ~~Groundhog Day~~ Valentine's Day tree yesterday. Yes, it's possible we're the last people in the greater Indianapolis area to take down our live Christmas tree. We normally take our tree down in early January and mulch it for the garden, but this year it stayed up through several more holidays than the usual Christmas and New Year's Day. But, in our defense, it was a live tree. Our plan was always to take it down as soon as it stopped drinking and started drying out, before it became a mess and/or fire hazard. And it was still lush and green and healthy until Wednesday, at which point the level in the water bowl stopped going down. We would've felt bad taking it down while it still had some life left in it, so we let it stay up and brighten our living room until it was necessary.

I have no idea how we managed to keep a live tree in such good shape for so long. I hear all kind of folk wisdom about keeping trees around longer; the big one is to put sugar in the water when you water the tree. We didn't do this. Ditto adding lemon juice, scoring the tree's base, or any of the other apocryphal tree-preservation tricks. All we did was water it with warm water, which can't make too much difference. But it was nice having it around a bit longer than normal.