American White Boy Minstrel Show

We had esteemed colleagues from Ireland visiting this week, and a veep had the idea to take them all for drinks at Bloomington's 'Irish Lion', the local approximation of an Irish pub, complete with menu items like 'Blarney Puffballs', 'Leprechaun Wings', and (they really loved this one) 'Offaly Salmon' (Offaly is landlocked, and has no major rivers). This was after he took them to the local steakhouse, 'Janko's Little Zagreb', where John Mellencamp occasionally eats. I've never eaten there, not in my 13 years of living in or near Bloomington, and since I wasn't invited for that bit, the streak continues.

The veep in question is much loved by the people at the European subsidiaries. He's in several photos on the walls at the facility in Limerick, and people have stories to tell about hanging out with him. A prevailing theory to explain this popularity is that he plays into those cherished American stereotypes with his full-on Hoosier accent with vulgarian tendencies, and his impressive gun collection (a favorite cherished memory for some of our European counterparts is going shooting with him. I did my part to reinforce the American gun-nut stereotype by lighting up and saying 'yeah, going shooting, that's a real American thing to do!' when I heard a story about a shooting outing). So he can get away with anything. I can hardly wait for the Australians to visit, we can all go for Bloomin' Onions at the Outback Steakhouse and maybe watch 'Crocodile Dundee' in his home theater (or, if he's really wanting to push the envelope, maybe 'Kangaroo Jack').

There is something to be said for playing into and reinforcing stereotypes as a way to get people to let their guard down and feel more at ease (but mostly, superior) around you. Actually a couple things can be said: that there's something artificial about it, that it's a lazy way to establish a superficial and weak rapport, that it's, in a word: pathetic. As Colonel Jay Garner, who was the interim president in Iraq for 3 weeks once said: we should all look in the mirror and say 'Damn, we're Americans!' But not while the superior programmers trained at the Indian Institute of technology are around, because they'd put that shit on YouTube, and suddenly a billion people are laughing at your sorry Yankee ass.

Of course, I could be totally wrong, and it could all be genuine. I have a Hoosier accent and vulgarian tendencies. I like to shoot guns when the opportunity comes up. I have been failing to appreciate classical music for almost 40 years now.

Tony Soprano reminded us all recently that ''remember when' is the lowest form of conversation'. The exception to this is when meeting with people from foreign lands. Then 'do you have XBox in Ireland?' is the lowest form of conversation. Sadly, the conversation never really rose above that level, but the Irish folks had a good sense of humor about the whole thing, and actually at one point a couple of them started singing some traditional Irish songs because the music ('that shit they play in tourist places') was getting on their nerves. Much beer was consumed, but nobody spilled the beans about the inner workings of either place, we were all too professional for that (in my case the need to drive home limited the beer consumption, and I refrained from telling too many tales as a result). They will return home to tell their friends about the silly place with the Leprechaun Wings and wonder at how much cheese Americans put in their food.

In the shadow of the library

'I'd rather die a pauper in the shadow of the libraries of Chicago than roll in wealth in Oklahoma.'

That's what my great grandfather wrote to his (relatively) wealthy family in Oklahoma. To me, it's a really defiant and cool thing to say: knowledge (and maybe even more importantly, the pursuit of knowledge) is worth more than a fancy house or the envy of the other folks in town. He got his wish, actually, dying in a flophouse that was walking distance from a really great library.

I respect the guy tremendously for doing his thing, but I seem to have fallen pretty far from that tree, spending a fair amount of time in Martinsville, IN enjoying a lake house and hot tub and all that noise instead of strugglin' in some metropolis or another. But we do have the internet, wikipedia, all that good stuff now. There's no substitute for a good library (or restaurant, come to think of it - Golden Corral just wasn't doing it for us, and has as much to do with our Exodus from Martinsville as anything else), but if you want to learn a thing or two, or escape from people who don't, you can, easily enough.

He also wrote a book that he believed debunked the theory of evolution, and spent considerable time orating and debating this topic on Bughouse Square in Chicago. He'd be pretty disappointed in my heathen ways.

His was also one of those strange stories where his son, forced to step up because Dad was so often off writing or debating or drinking, turned into a truly amazing individual. WWII veteran, steady provider for a ridiculously huge and coincidentally Catholic family, greatest generation and all that. Maybe a crappy childhood is good for kids? Not unlike in the book Dune, where the Sardaukar are raised in an environment where 6 out of 13 die before the age of 11, so the ones that survive are incredible, merciless warriors? My wife's childhood wasn't always Full House with Bob Saget, and she's pretty amazing, too.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still taking my daughter for ice cream this weekend, I just hope I don't ruin her future by doing so.

Little Shopworth of Horrors

Yesterday we stayed at the West Baden Springs Hotel as part of its soft-opening. It is a site to see, and has not been a hotel since 1932 (a combination of the Great Depression and modern medicine sunk it, but it was a Jesuit Seminary for a while anyhow). The dome in the center is amazing. You could re-enact the Battle of Britain inside with radio-controlled squadrons of Spitfires and Messerschmitts, maybe have a Churchill look-alike hanging out at the bar on the periphery.

On the way down we stopped at a Shopworth because we needed Goldfish crackers and water. It looked like it was a grocery store from the outside. I stepped inside and entered a post-apocalyptic, 28 Days Later, mostly empty grocery store. Also, it smelled very strange inside. Somewhere between urine and cleaning fluids.

Where there'd ordinarily be produce, there was nothing but that green astro-turfy lining. They didn't even have the couple token un-rotten apples ('irradiation!') our protagonists in 28 Days Later were able to score. The whole back half of the place was a white expanse of empty shelves. I tried and failed to find Goldfish, having to make due with 'Wheatables' with a December '06 expiration date. They did have water, though.

The whole time I was there I felt a sense of dread that was even worse than the low-level panic attacks I suffer at Best Buy. I was really happy to get the fuck out of there. I don't know what was going on. I know there's a science to the layout of a grocery store, product placement, the order you encounter different products. It's the sort of thing you laugh about because it seems like such a trivial application of mental energy, until you stumble on a place that looks like it was designed to fool you for a second into thinking everyone you've ever cared about is dead.

The rest of the trip was a lot of fun, though, especially the train trip past Larry Bird's boyhood home.

True Hip Hop Facts

Inspired by the 'Hip-Hop Nuggets' issue of 'Stop Smiling Magazine - the magazine for high-minded low-lifes', and the fact that I got 50 million search hits for mentioning 'Ghostface Killah' in the last post:

• Many people know about the tragic deaths of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, but a little-known hip-hop tragedy was the fact that Ol' Dirty Bastard died only a few days before a blueberry-flavored crack was released on the streets of New York.
• In fact, if you speed up the croaking sound at the beginning of 'The Drunk Game' from Return To the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, it's ODB saying 'I wish there was blueberry-flavored crack'
• Many hip hop heads stopped smoking marijuana after the release of Method Man's 2nd LP, Tical 2000: Judgement Day, although no anti-drug messages appear in the lyrics or liner notes.
• Although the looped sample of Minister Farrakhan laughing on the now out-of-print 'Edutainment' CD by Boogie Down Productions makes him sound equal parts creepy and insane, this wasn't KRS-ONE's intent.
• Ghostface Killah has the diabetes, just like Wilfred Brimley and 20.8 million other people in the U.S.
• Ghostface Killah pronounces it 'die-a-bee-teez'.
  
• MF Doom is actually 5 people who take turns wearing the mask for performances and 'featuring' appearances on other peoples' records.
  
• Ice Cube considers these the 3 greatest challenges of his life: growing up in South Central Los Angeles, writing lyrics the untalented but wealthy Eazy-E could deliver, and thinking up good things to say about his latest movie 'Are We Done Yet?' for his appearance on 'The Today Show'
  
• Proof that hip hop artists are smarter than their colleagues in the entertainment world: no prominent hip-hop artists are Scientologists.
• Eminem was fined $20,000 for shoving an e-meter up a Scientologist's ass, and was required to attend anger management training.
• KRS-ONE's toenail clippings have written better rhymes than Paul Wall.
• D.J. Screw got the inspiration for his trademark 'screwed and chopped' style from country music sensation Mel Tillis.
• Many music journalists are surprised and bewildered to learn Big Boi from Outkast is a big fan of Kate Bush, because at a meeting of the music journalist's guild in the early 80s, they decreed that black people aren't allowed to listen to Kate Bush.
  
• Ghostface Killah
• Ghostface Killah
  

Ghostface Killah Apologizes to Imus and his Family

Don't play me like I got a flower pot head, kid

In response to the widespread conservative outrage at rap lyrics following Don Imus' recent firing for referring to the Rutger's women's basketball team as 'a bunch of nappy headed ho's', Ghostface Killah stepped forward to issue an apology:

"Yo yo yo God check it. When I wrote my lyrics in '93, boom, I never thought they'd be firin a n%*(*% for callin women hos in 2007, boom. I had crazy visions son, boom! I was ready to rock n%(*$(*%, for real. Those were the cream joints, boom. But then some old white n*(*(%, here he comes with my word, tryin to flip it and bounce it, not usin it right, first of all, next thing you know, m5%(^$*(* lost his $*%#(*( job, kid."

'...like a werewolf who didn't

have the energy to complete

the transformation' - Dennis Miller

re: Imus

At this point fellow Wu-Tang member U-God asked "Is he dead?"

"No no no, he just old, he looks like that. So yo, I'm very sorry for any trouble I may have caused this n$#(*#$(*% and his family. I was just a knucklehead out to make some money for my family, yo, knamsayin? How I was gonna know a 70 year old white m$*%($*#( with 50 years of radio experience was gonna use my words and lose his job?

Ol' Dirty used to say 'Everything Wu-Tang does is for the children', but now, Wu-Tang is gonna do some shit for old rich white n$(*(*$s on the radio, too. One love!"

Reykjavik Part 3 of N: Before the Memory Fades

The day after the encounter with the drunk Swedes and the drunk Icelanders we planned to make a serious effort to see the Northern Lights, but that wasn't going to happen until nighttime. We were there at the tail-end of winter, and it got dark between 7-8, so it was definitely not round-the-clock darkness time.

We started off at Siggi Hall, where breakfast was free and consisted of an assortment of breads and cheeses, boiled eggs, fruit, smoked salmon, and more skyr. We sat near a window and watched people stumble home from the night of drunken revelry.

We marvelled at this as while food in Iceland is expensive, liquor is even more so. Icelanders explained to us a lot of pre-loading happens before people head out for the evening. We also heard some grumbling as to the price of a dinner in Reykjavik from natives. A little digging around on the intarnets (especially this site, 'Statistics Iceland') shows the average income in Iceland for 2005 was ~3.1 million ISK, somewhere in the neighborhood of $45,000 (also we find women's average income is 63.7% of men's - this is up from 57% in 1998 though). So things are expensive in Iceland. On the flip side, unemployment is 3%. Also, and though this is less easy to quantify, Iceland is said to be one of the happiest nations around. Journalist Eric Weiner attributes this in part to a culture that embraces risk taking and doesn't stigmatize failure. Maybe it's the sense of independence that comes from being self-reliant combined with the benefit of having the North Atlantic to separate you from pesky neighbors.

By the way, here's a blog (Iceland Report) by a guy who moved from Boston to Iceland, and must be one of the happiest people on Earth. He notes that often American tourists will ask him why Icelanders are so happy, but then will try to refute any answer he offers:

I have had now had variations of this conversation (about why Icelanders are happy) so many times with American visitors that I try to ensure the topic never comes up.

So, when in Iceland, resist the urge to debunk their happiness (other topics to avoid, I am told: elves/hidden folk and Vikings.)

Anyhow, much exploration of Reykjavik happened. We saw the famous babies left in strollers parked outside stores. They were cute and content. We saw a couple young graffiti artists headed out to do some work, pens in hands. We saw some other graffiti artists who'd been busted washing a storefront under the supervision of an older guy. We checked out the Viking Ship sculpture near the harbor, which begs to be climbed up on. We had hummus and coffee at a cafe that doubles as an anarchist bookstore and library. The shelves were full of back issues of Anarchy magazine and various publications by Noam Chomsky. A flyer for a punk rock show featured Condoleeza Rice shouting something in Icelandic in a talk balloon. I picked up a pamphlet in Icelandic featuring a cute cartoon bunny holding a monkey wrench on the cover.

We went to the semi-famous KaffeeBarinn. This is the bar partially owned by the Gorilla's (ex-Blur guy) Damon Albarn, but that's a bit of a joke. Being a Bloomington resident, I've probably eaten at an Arby's partially owned by John Mellencamp, and it wasn't a big deal. I got served a Big Beef 'n' Cheddar by Henry Lee 'Wish I had A Girl that walked like that, oh yeah' Summer, and that also was not a big deal. But, being a fan of some Icelandic musicians (Bjork, Sigur Ros, GusGus, probably others) I had to check the place out. Outside, the American photographer from the bus ride from Keflavik was taking pictures of some guy who looked like Cold Play's Dad. I have no idea who he was, but judging by the number of pictures taken, he must have been somewhat famous or wealthy. Perhaps he bought out Damon Albarn's share. The woman from the bus was there too. It was underwhelming, but of course it was still daytime. It's quite small inside, and people were hanging out doing the lap top thing. We had coffees and went on to the next thing.

We found a used-record store. I had to check that out, and found a bewildering assortment of CDs by regional bands I'd never heard of. They also had American stuff, including DVDs of the forgotten 2000 Eminem movie 'Da Hip Hop Witch' and the movie version of the video game Doom (a local laughed and told us 'It sucks.' when I picked it up out of curiosity). I pondered but did not purchase a book on Meteorology written in Icelandic. My wife ended up picking up a Eurythmics CD we'd never heard of (In The Garden) for 500 ISK ($7.50). The shop owner had a turntable near the register and was playing 'Abbey Road' on vinyl. In the back was a room behind a curtain, where they had all the porn, which possibly kept the place in business, God bless it.

Following dinner at Tivoli (featuring inattentive wait staff, but good food - a scallops/mussells/fish and pasta dish in my case with a Pinotage and some Creme Brulee), it was time for our Northern Lights Excursion, but first we were to check out the ghost story tour in a building which used to be a warehouse where frozen fish was stored. Our tour guide, Brahin or Ibrahim (I wasn't sure) picked us up at the hotel and we left Reykjavik. More in the next installment.

In Search Of Excellence: BioMedenetix

BioMedenetix is on the cutting edge of the growing Biotech industry and promises to bring much-needed hope to a region gutted by the ongoing elimination of American Manufacturing jobs. Led by a man with a Hobbit-like mischievous grin and over 35 years of being allowed inside one of America's largest pharmaceutical companies by Security, it is definitely a company to watch.

Watching it is what we did on a recent visit to the campus. On arrival we noticed a shuttle bus. At first we thought: what a good corporate citizen BM is, providing transportation to employees in the area to cut down on fuel costs and pollution in the community. Then we noticed the bus never left the parking lot, which was approximately the size of the parking lot at an average American High School. Actually a small to mid size High School, or perhaps a church parking lot in a small town, a church for one of the smaller denominations, like Seventh Day Adventists maybe. If nothing else, it showed a commitment to employee's well being, assuming the employees get exercise in some other manner than by walking from their car to the front door.

We decided to try out this bit of corporate pampering for ourselves. While this is not on the level of the on-site masseuse of the dot-com era, nor Google's fabled chef who used to be THE CHEF FOR THE GRATEFUL DEAD, it is something anyway. We appreciated the heating on the brisk, 42 degree Midwestern day, and enjoyed 23 seconds of some inoffensive pop music played on the bus's sound system. Neither the bus driver nor the riders emitted any offensive odors, and in general it was nothing like the horrific experiences chronicled in Wesley Willis' lyrics, like these from 'Get On The City Bus':

The 11 Lincoln bus came to my stop
As I got off the bus, I told the male bus driver to shove a broomstick up his ass
He got so tired of my disharmonious bullshit
He threatened to clock a transfer puncher upside my head

As a matter of fact, the bus driver was very courteous and professional, if slightly dizzy.

Next time: Pre-chewed food: the next big thing in corporate food service?

Reykjavik Part 2 of N: Friendly Drunk Swedes, Unnaturally Blue Water, Imaginative Eyewear

Reykjavik water's edge

After being dropped off at Hotel Odinsve we decided to take a nap. We got in the tiny elevator (my experienced world traveller wife had made a point of leaving the especially big suitcase at home, anticipating this) and then checked out the room for a bit (also small, but the entire wall facing the street was a window. We could see the ocean.) and fell asleep. For a bit.

The phone rang and my wife picked up. It was some joker from work. He had a question. Nothing was particularly wrong, but he had a question. Anyhow she refused to wake me up, but I woke up anyhow and called back to find that there was no problem to get bent out of shape about.

We left to explore the city. The obvious starting point was Hallgrimskirkja. Out front is a statue of Leifr Eiríksson, who discovered North America (Vinland) around 1000 A.D. (sorry Tony Soprano). Inside is a very impressive pipe organ, with 5275 pipes, some point outward like cannons which is quite odd looking.

After reading about rotten shark, pickled ram's testicles, and the aforementioned singed sheep's heads before for our trip, we decided to play it safe for our first meal in town and ate at a vegetarian place, the 'One Woman Restaurant'. We had some curry and daal there, and a couple of lattes. The one woman, like pretty much everyone we were to encounter in Reykjavik, spoke English well.

One thing we noticed immediately were the blocky glasses many people were wearing. The frames were thick and rectangular. Despite my quasi-Nordic appearance, my wire-frame glasses gave me away as an American. I had noticed a Dutch co-worker sporting similar frames on last summer's visit to Ireland, but just figured he wore them because he was a cool punk rock guy. People of all ages were rocking these. To hell with LASIK surgery.

Later, when we were back in the U.S. eating breakfast in New York, we noticed an older guy wearing glasses like we'd seen in Iceland. Within seconds, another guy at his table jokingly referred to him as 'that Icelandic Prick'.

Our first touristy excursion was a trip to the Blue Lagoon. It's a geothermal spa next to a geothermal power plant, and it's not far from the airport in Keflavik. The water is an unnatural neon blue.

Inside we encountered more of Iceland's technological wonders. We received bracelets which both locked a locker when swept by a sensor on the door, and also could be used to purchase Viking Beer or other drinks in the lounge area. I failed to operate the lock properly, and found the door hanging open when I returned (none of my belongings were missing).

Showering naked with strangers is required before entering the Blue Lagoon, but there are partitions along the wall, so it's not some prison scene in there. From the shower area, it's possible to get in the Blue Lagoon before going outside. But we walked out on the wooden deck and enjoyed a few seconds of snow and wind before getting in. It was snowing heavily, and employees in full winter gear hovered around along the edge of the water. We relaxed in the 105F water. Some people put white mud on their faces so they could look like a photo negative of Al Jolson in 'The Jazz Singer'. Mammy!

I accidentally swallowed some water. It tasted very salty, but that was about it. I was a bit concerned about ingesting unnaturally colored water, but nothing came of it. I did not become horribly ill, nor did I develop superpowers and become Glacier Man.

Eventually we headed back inside, ate more skyr and hung out while waiting for the bus. A couple guys wearing Red Sox gear with heavy Boston accents were in our group. My wife asked one was he from Boston and he asked 'how'd you know?' My wife told them she was from Boston, but left because she married me. "Jerk." said one of them. We later wondered if they were on the run from the law, hiding out in Iceland.

The bus eventually showed up, and we asked where were we going for part 2, the 'Northern Lights Excursion'. Our Chuck Norris looking bus driver laughed and explained that was the drive back. We didn't see any Northern Lights through our windows.

Some Graffiti in Reykjavik.

As we got back to Reykjavik I again noticed some prominent graffiti in a spot under a bridge. A 'Welcome to Reykjavik' sign would have looked good there, but this graffiti said 'Supernova Sucks'. I agree, but wouldn't go through the trouble of painting it on a wall. I thought it was strange, until I later found out one of the contestants on 'Rock Star: Supernova' was Magni Asgeirsson of Iceland. He lost the competition, or didn't, depending on how you look at it.

After returning it was time to get something to eat. We had no plans, and decided to continue the risk-averse streak as far as eating went and seek out a pizza place of some kind. We ended up at Rosso Pomodoro, an Italian place that's a chain, but a good one. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with Pomodoro Rosso in New York, immortalized in Seinfeld as a good place for breakups.

Before we even sat down a very large table of men in the 30-45 age range started singing. While they didn't have fantastic voices, they sounded really good, like they'd been practicing. They were all singing in the same key and at the same tempo. They were also drinking and apparently heavily, as a couple of them fell down (but they got up again).

We decided to sit at the table next to them not in spite of the fact that they were drunk and acting odd, but because of it, but soon we started getting an uncomfortable vibe as one kept looking at us when we talked and said a couple things to the guy sitting next to him. Then one of them put his glass of wine on the table and got in our space. The waitress asked him not to put his glass on our table, so he took it off for a second and then put it back. I wasn't sure what to make of it, but I just looked at him and said 'hey, how are you doing?'

He was pretty well drunk, but friendly enough. It turned out he and his compatriots were from Sweden ('the southern part'). We complimented them on their fine cars. They all were part of a 'Gentlemen's Club' called 'Round Table'. In the U.S., 'Gentlemen's Club' means a building with no windows with girls inside stripping to make college money, but in this case apparently it's a group of guys who take trips together and get drunk and sing and generally have a good time. About halfway through our dinner (I had some really good salmon), they got up, sang another song which I assume was in Swedish so nobody else in the restaurant knew what they were singing about either, and they were on their way.

We wandered Reykjavik and caught the beginning of the night's drunken revelry, but were tired and made our way back to the Hotel.

This English Professor Hates Sam Harris

Mary Grabar has a Ph.D. in English. She wrote a screed on the townhall site about Sam Harris. Her comments on science have been dismissed by the esteemed Dr. Joan Bushwell (who has a Ph.D. in science!) as laughable. What I really loved in the article was this bit at the end:

"I have seen the customers who fondled your book and read the jacket with self-satisfied expressions...Your little tome at $16.95 graces their bookshelves along with those by Bill Moyers and the atheist authors you recommend. These progressives proudly display their reading material as they serve canapés and cocktails to similarly correct-minded, nipped and Botox-ed activists, who only really just want what is good for us. Your slim, easy-to-read pamphlet is just right for trips to the salon, masseuse, and transcendental meditation retreat. Your fans cluck over the ignorance and benightedness of those like me—their gold and diamonds shining in the ambient light of their converted warehouse condos. You amaze them with your profundity, your ability to string together clichés and tired arguments, and in 91 small widely spaced pages tear down the foundations of the civilization put in place by millennia of thinkers and the Church Fathers. For your book, they whipped out the credit cards from Louis Vitton bags."

Heh heh, no irony there with the strung together cliches. I think I'm gonna pop open a bottle of Veuve Cliquot now and have a chuckle at whatever's on CBN now, then maybe drive to Starbucks in my Volvo and buy a CD by my favorite lesbian songwriter while making a snide remark about Toby Keith to the barista. Yep.

Soon, more about Reykjavik.

Reykjavik Report Part 1of N

You can tell it's Reykjavik because of the Hallgrimskirkja back there.

We recently took a break from the corporate grind to do something completely different in a place which was completely different from our usual environment (except for everybody still speaking English), namely, Reykjavik and the surrounding region in Southwestern Iceland.

The stated goal was to see the Northern Lights, which I very much wanted to see. Given that the Northern Lights are not particularly predictable, we needed to go someplace that would still be a cool place to be if there were no Northern Lights, so we chose Iceland. Actually my wife chose Iceland. The whole thing was a surprise for me in honor of my turning 37 (time is running out, see the Northern Lights now. See the glaciers before they melt away).

We were there for 3 nights which was great, but we were sorry to leave. The past week I've been checking out various Iceland related websites (the Grapevine, Iceland's English Language newspaper, is a good one) when I need a 5 minute mental vacation from the tedium, the ongoing struggles between the fragile egos, and the ridiculous requests to do stupid demeaning shit.

As the Chinese proverb goes, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a miserable airline experience, but things started off smoothly enough travelling from Indianapolis to JFK airport. There some Australian asshole wearing a blingy New York Yankees cap and fancy jacket (maybe he was rich or famous, I don't know) cut in front of everyone in line at the British Airways desk only to be given the what-for by an elderly woman in line in front of us.

We had dinner at the airport and the $8 margaritas were good preparation for the priciness of food in general we were to encounter in Iceland (the conversion rate was 67 ISK to 1 USD, which doesn't tell you much. A better way to put it is to imagine a Starbucks ($3 coffee)/Football Stadium ($4.50 hot dog) food pricing scheme generalized to everything). We eventually got on the plane, where we waited at the gate for 2+ hours while the maintenance crew fixed something or another so we wouldn't crash into the North Atlantic and find out whether we'd freeze or drown first. The flight attendants handed out a paper in Icelandic, which we looked through and wondered at all the ways there is to make the 'th' sound.

Despite the assistance of alcohol and the Dalai Lama Maroon neck pillow purchased at the airport, as always I was unable to sleep on the plane. So I noticed around 3am somebody had decided it would be a good idea to have the Dustin Hoffman transvestite vehicle Tootsie as the in-flight movie. OK.

A couple hours later while walking up and down the aisle, I heard the captain give a very long announcement in Icelandic, and figured we must be near our destination, which the follow-up in English confirmed. Having worked some of the stiffness out of my legs, I was very excited despite my tiredness and the documentary on Kenny G that followed Tootsie on the Monitor Screens.

After waiting in a couple of lines, we got on the FlyBus and made our way from Keflavik (check out the cool 'sperm penetrating the egg' sculpture) to Reykjavik. In my extremely sleepy state I did my best to ignore the American photographer and the Icelandic businesswoman trying to impress each other so I could check out the landscape, which doesn't really look like Earth. There's lots of black, cracked volcanic rock in the foreground, covered with very short green lichens that take 70 years to grow, with beautiful mountains and the ocean in the distance. There are no animals anywhere (except the occasional bird), yet there's life everywhere. Little scrubby bits of non-sentient life, but still, life.

We ended up at the bus terminal where there's a Restaurant called 'Fljott og Gott' (Something and Goat). The logo is a happy cartoon chef holding a platter which has a sheep's head on it, and the (singed) head is sporting a baseball cap at a jaunty angle. He is like the Flavor Flav of decapitated sheep. Unfortunately I can't find this image on the web, just an uninteresting alternative with a hamburger instead of a goat's head. I would like a t-shirt with this logo, but it's probably not to be.

There were no goat's heads or rotten shark (Hakarl) to be found inside, though. Just assorted sandwiches, Viking Beer (with 2% alcohol content, now you too can drink like a Viking), and skyr, a thick Icelandic yogurt which is delicious! We picked up some skyr, water, and a free copy of the aforementioned 'Grapevine', with the cover 'The U.S. vs. Laxness', which in my ignorance, I thought had something to do with American can-do spirit and perkiness conquering laziness and ennui or something. Halldor Laxness was an Icelandic author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955.

Our brusque driver dropped us off at the Hotel Odinsve (Odin's Dwelling) on Thorsgata (Thor's Street). Really.

We decided to start things off by sleeping for a couple of hours as we were running on fumes at this point.

The Ray Smuckles Google Logo Greasemonkey Plugin

Inspired by this achewood strip.

One of 5403003 Greasemonkey scripts inspired by same.

Code follows, chochachos.

---------------------------

// ==UserScript==
// @name RayLogo
// @namespace SDC
// @description achewood logo
// @include http://www.google.com/
// @exclude
// @exclude
// ==/UserScript==
var allEle = document.evaluate("//IMG[@alt='Google']",
document,
null,
XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,
null);
allEle.snapshotItem(0).src ="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/150/393366534_d37972fd53.jpg?v=0";

Enjoy this 107-year-old cartoon

I've been a life-long fan of animation and recently have been reading the history/how-to/survey 'Animation: The Whole Story' by Howard Beckerman. The book discusses early stabs at animation, including J. Stewart Blackton's 'The Enchanted Drawing' and the jaw-droppingly racist (but that's how people were, we're assured) 'Lightning Sketches'.

Thanks to YouTube you can actually see 1900's 'The Enchanted Drawing' and marvel at how we got from there to the likes of 'Spirited Away'. It addresses universal themes like the joys of consuming alcohol.

Also on YouTube: 'The Humorous Phases of Funny Faces'

Neither of the aforementioned are quite what we think of as cartoons today, but rather film-enhanced versions of vaudeville-era 'chalk talks'. This 'Felix' cartoon from 1923 is considerably more sophisticated (and entertaining).

Unfortunately, I was unable to locate 'Gertie The Trained Dinosaur' (1914).

The long awaited conclusion to my story about my role in the 4-day Class War of 2004

The Union, CWA, made the announcement the week before Memorial Day. This wasn't going to be an old school strike, where everyone would stand together for weeks, maybe months, until the company came back to the table to give them a square deal.

This was a new concept in strikes for a new century, one where the folks in the Union had drunk the materialism/consumer culture Kool-Aid every bit as much as any Beemer driving Junior Exec with his eyes on the prize, and they were up to their eyeballs in SUV and McMansion debt as much as the next guy. To their credit, the people running things at the Union recognized this new reality called for a different approach. This would be a MICRO Strike.

The Union would walk out Thursday night. The faithful would show up to picket Fri-Mon, taking turns to ensure everybody got a shot at the 3-day weekend barbeque scene.

The management (and 'management') suckers would miss out on the 3-day weekend, and their Friday was really going to suck, too.

I was to report at 7:30am. If I didn't, I'd face disciplinary action up to and including termination.

I left the house around 9am. I showed up a bit after 10. I was, as I previously mentioned, dreading this assignment to the point of physical illness (way to go, CWA). I was at this point kind of hoping to get fired.

It seems irrational, seeing as there was an end in sight, and I wasn't being asked to spend a year away from everyone and everything I love in a desert shithole or anything like that, but that's what phobias are, irrational fears. I had a phobia about working Customer Service. Pretty much every move and action I had taken in life was geared toward avoiding working Customer Service. Yet here I was, going to my shift.

At the front door, I was met by a couple of women from the Union. They were picketing, I think, though they didn't have signs. They hadn't even had their kids make signs like some of the other Unionites did.

'Are you management?' one asked.

'Yes'.

'Good luck'

'Good luck to you'

As I entered I heard them laughing. "He looked so SAD!"

I'm sure I did.

Inside I collected tickets good for $5 worth of cafeteria food. On the 18th floor, I read a paper with some last-minute instructions. It told us we were to tell everybody who called we couldn't fix their phone for a month, and blame it on the strike.

A woman wearing a t-shirt depicting Rosie the Riveter and her slogan 'We Can Do It' ('it' being stomp the last wisps of life out of the working class, I guess) optimistically asked was I in for an 11am shift.

'No, 7:30' I said, offering nothing in the way of apology or remorse.

I was ready to get blasted, but her face just kind of fell and she thought about things to say but didn't say them, opting eventually to say 'I'll show you to your seat'.

'Great'.

I took very long coffee breaks including a really long walk around the downtown area. I ran into somebody I knew who eventually asked if I was on strike, and I said no, I'm working. After about a day of alternating between my breaks and having elderly people share their fantasies about my father having a medical emergency and dying because his phone didn't work, I said 'fuck this shit altogether', and called in sick the next day. And the next, and the last. During one of the calls I got voice mail, and might have been drowned out by Chris Rock's 1993 Gangsta Rap version of 'Spinal Tap', 'CB4', because I was watching it at the time.

Tuesday morning we watched the news and an SBC PR flunky announced everything had been worked out and we were a happy family again. My wife said 'Oh that's great, now everything's back to normal and you're probably out of a job'.

'Eh, I'm going in anyway.'

I showed up and somebody in the elevator in the parking garage clued me in that we were to go to a meeting where we'd be 'released' from strike duty. I went and sat with a bunch of management flunkies while the guy in charge of all the customer service people thanked us profusely for saving the company and doing a great job, blah blah blah. Then we all left and shook his hand on the way out. He had a puzzled look on his face as I shook his hand. I smiled at him.

I went to my cube and never heard anything from anyone about it again. I told one co-worker about my antics, but otherwise kept my mouth shut and said nothing. I did find out one of my colleagues wrote a lengthy e-mail to our boss Thursday night after 5pm explaining he would show up for his regular job and work the longer (12 hour shift), but no way was he going on strike duty, because that wasn't what he signed up for. They called him at home to tell him his ass was fired and he didn't need to come back. Supposedly a lot of people got cut loose this way, but in a company of 17o,ooo people, nobody really matters.

That weekend, I realized that, and I decided to use the fact that nobody gave a shit about me to my advantage. So the Union lost, and CWA lost, but I won.

Some people have had long careers and built whole lives and families around being utterly meaningless cogs in the machine, catching the scraps of cash the company leaks their way, both and SBC and at other corporations, but eventually I got offered a job elsewhere and got the hell out of there.

Next time, back to briefer, goofier material.

11,000 Football Fields

Now that both James Brown's and Gerald Ford's corpses have cooled off a bit, I noticed CNN has decided to report on other stories again, at least until the impending and inevitable demise of Saddam Hussein (Oh No! No 'Zabiba and the King II'! Don't leave me hanging!)

One story today was about the ice shelf snapping off in the Arctic, specifically off Ellesmere Island in Canada. Reporters always like to put the sizes of things in terms you, the layman can understand, one popular unit of measurement being the football field. So in this case, 11,000 football fields. How is that gonna help me? I've never seen 11,000 football fields together. 11,000 is a big number. Is that how many grains are in a bag of rice? Am I supposed to spill the bag on the floor, and then imagine each grain is a football field? I'm kind of adrift here. That's like 'the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. That's like 2x10^13 network TV commercial breaks.' It doesn't really help.

Update: Saddam Hussein was hanged 2 hours ago. That's the time it would take a cheetah to travel 140 miles, if he were running on the Bonneville Salt Flats, and had plenty of water stations along the route.

Some Stuff I learned this Holiday Season, aka Christmastime

This December, my daughter and I watched the 1964 Christmas special 'Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer' more times than I care to admit or contemplate. Thank God for DVRs, I guess. When I was a kid, you got to see it once, and that was it until next year, forget about it.

The big revelation watching it now at 36 as opposed to 6 is that every authority figure in that show is a complete asshole. Santa is a grumpy old prick who treats his loving wife like crap, and tells Rudolph's father 'you should be ashamed of yourself' when Rudolph's nose starts glowing. The elf boss gives would-be dentist Hermie no end of crap, and is totally closed-minded about Hermie's toy ideas. Rudolph's father forces him to wear an embarassing prosthesis, and the reindeer coach is completely unable to ignore the nose after Rudolph kicks every other reindeer's ass in the 'Take Off' game.

The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the riots at the Chicago convention, even the Prague Spring and the student strikes and riots in Paris in '68, it all makes sense now. Adults in the 60's had a stick up their collective ass, and by God, they had to go down. Too bad things didn't work out better than they did.

In other Christmas viewing we saw the new Christmas Classic that is the Polar Express. It is a spectacle to be sure, and scenes like the one with the ticket that flies out the window but eventually makes it way back on the train make the movie worth watching, and worth looking past the eerie rubber-faced creepiness of a lot of the computer-animated humans (check out the article 'The Undead Zone' for more on the phenomenon, observed by a Japanese roboticist back in 1978. From the article:

In 1978, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed something interesting: The more humanlike his robots became, the more people were attracted to them, but only up to a point. If an android become too realistic and lifelike, suddenly people were repelled and disgusted.

The problem, Mori realized, is in the nature of how we identify with robots. When an android, such as R2-D2 or C-3PO, barely looks human, we cut it a lot of slack. It seems cute. We don't care that it's only 50 percent humanlike. But when a robot becomes 99 percent lifelike—so close that it's almost real—we focus on the missing 1 percent. We notice the slightly slack skin, the absence of a truly human glitter in the eyes. The once-cute robot now looks like an animated corpse. Our warm feelings, which had been rising the more vivid the robot became, abruptly plunge downward. Mori called this plunge "the Uncanny Valley," the paradoxical point at which a simulation of life becomes so good it's bad.

)

Anyhow, if that weren't bad enough, the creepy simulation of a human being that is Steven Tyler of Aerosmith appears toward the end of the film as an elf on a unicycle, singing some song about rocking on top of the world, and the moment is such a jarring, whiplash-inducing distillation of repulsive stomach-churning awfulness it somehow manages to ruin the movie utterly. Why oh why is that scene in the movie? It didn't really bother my daughter, though.

Finally this year I finally got to see 'A Christmas Story' from start to finish, which was a mistake. Better to catch the odd 5 minutes here or there, which you can't help doing if you own a TV and aren't afraid to use it. Seeing it from start to finish seems wrong somehow. Also, the movie seems to completely unravel during the last 10 minutes ('and that was the year we discovered Chinese turkey').

Anyhow, Happy Kwanzaa to those of you celebrating that, Happy New Year, so on.

That one band with the one good song

I was listening to Retro-Active on MusicChoice the other night (typically I listen to Electronica (Uncensored), the only channel with the (Uncensored), though mostly the lyrics are happy e-damaged nonsense when there are lyrics).

They played the 12" of 'Uncertain Smile', by 'The The', one of the worst band names ever ('The This. The That. How about we call it The The? Heh heh heh.' this conversation was held thousands of times and the possibility dismissed, until Matt Johnson decided to go ahead and use the name).

The song is really good, it's got a jangly simple guitar bit, nice use of synthesizer, and a great vocal performance. So, thanks to iTunes I soon had a copy (of the non-12" version, I kept getting an error on the 12" version) of the song in my collection.

Around there things started to break down. I listened to some of the other tracks from that album (Soul Mining), and from other albums by The The, but nothing really moved me to fork over $0.99. I would then go to Pandora.com, where 'Uncertain Smile Radio' would serve up a series of similar shoulder-shrug selections (The Ramones' 'I want you around'? Joe Jackson? Dave Matthews band?). Eventually I gave up and listened to 'Hallogallo Radio' (The first song on Neu!'s album, Neu!), which if you're me is consistently good, even when it whips out the art-rock era Genesis ('Submarine'). If you are anyone else, it probably sounds like art-damaged music that's alternately boring and grating.

Whilst writing this I googled up "The Making Of Matt Johnson's 'Uncertain Smile'", on a site that makes the most Ritalin-addled mySpacer's page look like a model of clean and readable web design. It was somewhat interesting to see that Matt Johnson himself had a hard time reproducing the magic when he re-recorded the song for the album:

The song Uncertain Smile featured on Soul Mining, the subsequent The The album. A completely new recording was made back in London, which must have disappointed the punters who bought it after hearing the original single. Both at this remove and at the time, it sounds curiously confused and unfocused, as if trying for whatever reason to make a fresh statement of the song but unable to escape from the grip of the first single.

The SBC/CWA micro-strike, Part II: Sitzkrieg

I was there, kids, back in '04 when the CWA (Communication Workers Of America, 'Fighting for jobs and healthcare') went up against Ed Whitacre and SBC (now AT&T, 'anti-job, pro-illness-induced-bankruptcy'). I was on the management side, although, as I explained in Part I, the only thing I managed was the microwave in the breakroom. I delegated heating up Hot Pockets to it.

I know a lot of arch-conservatives and Libertarian types start to pleasure yourselves when you hear stories about management employees taking over jobs abandoned by Union Workers during strikes, sticking it to those ungrateful commie bastards by showing them anyone can do their job, but the reality was not so glamorous in this case.

Around April, after a lot of posturing by both sides, the Union voted to authorize the strike. They gave SBC a 30-day warning. As part of our 'BCP', business continuity plan, we were to receive strike assignments - we'd be told what Union jobs we'd be pretending to take over.

I hoped I would get something cool like driving a repair truck or working at a Central Office, but I got what was to me the worst possible assignment - taking calls from customers who were having trouble with their service.

Some people fear flying, some fear public speaking, but in my case the thought of spending who knows how many 12-hour shifts taking calls from angry assholes while another asshole gave me grief about not taking enough calls or spending too long on a call filled me with fear and dread. I started having nightmares about it. I started sending out resumes and spending large chunks of the days and nights working on a Sanity Continuity Plan.

We were assigned, via e-mails that were machine-generated using threatening templates ('up to and including termination' being a common phrase) a list of on-line training courses we were to take. These familiarized us with the antiquated mainframe-based systems we'd somehow be using to get information. They all had 3-or-4 letter unpronounceable acronym names.

After the online training, we got to spend several days in the classroom. This was especially great. For some reason they did not have a test version of the fresh-for-74 software to use for training. I found this out after the instructor noticed I was goofing off, submitting fake tickets for cities in Ohio. Suddenly she had to stop the class so she could cancel the tickets, so repairmen would not be sent out on wild goose chases all over Ohio.

If I still gave a shit about the company at that point, I would have been mortified, sitting up there in one of the front rows, answering her questions about what I'd put in, watching the people in the rows behind me resentfully glare at me for managing to make an already tedious class even more boring, and jeopardizing the most glorious mission of exalted management in service of number one cowboy asshole Ed, but somehow I had crossed over into a kind of temporary sociopathy, and found the whole thing really amusing (I made an effort not to smirk, though).

Eventually the trucks were called back and class resumed. We did a lot of role-playing, pretending to be angry customers and all that. We watched recordings of actual calls, which were neat because they showed the reps goofing off on the internet during calls. After 2 days of this, miraculously I was not fired, but was deemed ready to man the phones if duty called.

Next time: duty calls, I let it go to voice mail.

Linux: It's the Journey. There is no destination.

I was reading wake up and smell the asphalt recently, by another running and DBAing person (she apparently has escaped IT for greener pastures recently, good for her), and ran across an entry about Linux: Sorry Linus, I tried. I could relate, particularly to this bit:

Tried to make sense of man pages that went on forever and ever. Refrained from asking questions that would only be met with "have you read the man pages?". Did a lot of gooling instead. Spent an entire 3-day weekend installing Oracle and was so disgusted with the process that I never started the service anymore after that.

I've been there. The thing is, I love Linux, always have. It's just a matter of understanding what Linux is about. It's an Albert Ellis, Rational Emotive Therapy kind of thing. Given a situation, you can make your own choice as to whether to love it or hate it. I choose love!

There was that time I spent a weekend figuring out how to get an old scanner to work on my RedHat system. I did a lot of Googling. Eventually it became evident I'd have to go into the source code itself, some C code I did not understand at all (knowing next to nothing about device drivers and all that), and make some changes based on on the advice of strangers on the intarweb. And then find out those recommended changes did not work. And then make some educated wild-ass guesses, and compile everything again.

At that point, I scanned the cover to my Soundtrack to 'The Harder They Come' CD (it is a true classic of reggae, of pop music in general in fact). It worked! I scanned a parody of the company newsletter I cut-n-pasted together in 1991. It worked, too! Hallelujah!

AND I NEVER USED THE SCANNER AGAIN.

There was no need to. I had won! Similarly, I figured out how to get the proper drivers and what-not to get my printer working under CUPS after installing Fedora Core on a system that is so hosed up it won't run (or even install) XP anymore. I have printed 2, maybe 3 maps from mapquest using it, but that's it. I won! I got it to work! I don't want to actually do anything with it. I don't give a shit about printing or printers, but I made it work. w00t! Fuck this computer shit, time to go for a run!

Linux is great for shit like this. Sometimes, I get stuff to work and find myself using it more than once or twice, but that's gravy. The point is getting stuff to work. Check out SourceForge. It's the repository for open-source projects, is what people will tell you. The truth is, 90% of the projects on there, if they were rock bands, they'd be stuck in the 'we designed the album cover on a page in our English notebook' stage for all time. Version 0.0.9. Forget about it.

I know. I'm a developer on a project or two there. No, I won't mention names.

The point of Linux is not necessarily that you write any great software or do anything with it. I remember Christmas Break of 1995. I was working a job I hated, making $10/hour writing C++ code for the US government. We were using Linux workstations, which were pretty cool. they were about all that was cool about the job, in fact. I called in sick one day and spent it installing Linux on my machine at home, Slackware. I watched the messages tell me what I'd be able to do when I was done. I could write code in C, C++, Perl, Fortran, Python, Tcl/TK, I could create my own programming language with bison. I could do anything! I felt tremendous power. Once I determined everything could boot up OK, and that everything seemed to work, instead of writing code to change the world, I went to my roommate's room (he went home for break) and watched Godfather II. It's a great movie, kind of long, though.

I read a 'News Of The Weird' story once about a guy who spent 17 years building a plane. On the first flight, he crashed and died. He probably had a lot of fun building it. He never should have finished the plane. He never should have flown it, had he finished it. And that's what it's all about, Linux. Making stuff work, not necessarily doing anything with it. It's the journey. There is no destination.

What did you do in the Class War, Daddy? - The SBC-CWA micro-strike of 2004, Part I

In 2004, SBC hadn't yet bought AT&T and changed their name back to AT&T. I worked in the Indianapolis SBC building as a code monkey putting semi-modern web application skins on decrepit ancient Mainframe applications. It was a living.

Every day I reported to a grey building and went up to a crummy cubicle off in an out-of-the-way area on a largely abandoned floor of the 18 floor building. Most of the people I worked with were in St. Louis, hundreds of miles away. Alienated? Yes. I hardly felt like a part of anything, but soon my arm would be twisted to stand alongside 'management' against 'labor', as labor's contract was up for renegotiation, as happens every 5 years.

The thought that I was part of 'management' was a joke. Nobody reported to me. I was classified as management so I would be unable to join the Union. I later heard on the SBC yahoo message board, where a lot of the posturing and mind-games around the strike were to take place, that people like me were called 'gerbils' in Union lingo, but that was the only time I heard the term, and half-assed Google searches didn't turn up much.

For several months in that year, 2004, our group essentially wasted our time on ineffective training so we could 'replace' the Union workers if it came to that, and our Union counterparts got to wear t-shirts with snakes on them and have the protests with the inflatable rats, satisfying some intrinsic need humans have to mob together and do the protest thing now and then. We already wasted time on stupid shit like the United Way, making sure everybody filled out their timesheets and TPS reports properly, and various programs to encourage us to do the hard sell on our family and friends, but during the strike it was like we all said to hell with any pretense of doing anything related to telecommunications or whatever the company was about. Some of my 'management' counterparts were very gung-ho, ready to fire everybody affiliated with the union in anyway (had they known how I felt about things, I probably would have been hung in the conference room as a class traitor) and re-build the company from there.

next time - going beyond the call for some asshole Texan cowboy not named George

Media Crimes Court - The Time is Now

When one person spends 10 minutes watching 'Deal or No Deal' or 'I Love The 70's', or 'The 100 most Fabulous Fashion Moments in Rock', it seems insignificant and harmless. But when 5 million people watch, an entire man-life (person life) of potential productivity is squandered. Every day, countless life-equivalents are destroyed by shitty TV programming, mediocre music, and blogs.

Time is pretty valuable. In the song 'Return The Gift' by the Gang Of Four, a schmuck who's won a radio contest begs the guy congratulating him 'please send me evenings and weekends'. Stuff isn't going to do him a damn bit of good, stuck as he is in a shitty soul-killing job. Similarly, Kirkegaard or somebody like that said in addition to buying books we should be able to buy the time to read them.

Maybe we should just shut the TV off, but we can't! We are lucky to be alive now, with YouTube and OnDemandTV and iTunes and NetFlix and so on. So many entertainment options! Our grandparents spent their lives in a grey Milton Berle and Lawrence Welk tedium I shudder to even ponder (that and that World War II thing. and the Depression).

Things have really gotten out of hand, and something needs to be done. There needs to be some court where people can be tried and convicted for wasting so much of our time on stupid shit. If Aaron Spelling were still alive, he would be the first one to go before such a court, and we'd make an example of him, but the terrible monster lived a long, full life blowing huge chunks out of the only lives Love Boat viewers will ever have. He slipped away like some Nazi living under an assumed name in Brazil, enjoying the climate while his comrades rotted in jail and his fellow Germans suffered countless indignities like the TV show 'Hogan's Heroes'. So it will have to be someone else.

This rant will be continued later. Against my better judgement I post this now.