Thank you kindly

I have had a bitch and a half of a week. It seems like each day brings its own particular brand of crap. And I’m not even going to go through it here.

In my NaNoWriMo novel, if faced with a week like this, one of my main characters would anesthetize herself with massive spreadsheets and crunch data until her ears were bleeding. The other main character would crank up the volume on a couple of Bach cantatas and then cycle through the Brandenburg concerti. My victim would have swallowed a bottleful of rum.

Me? I’m hunkered down with DVDs of the entire Due South series.

Make of that what you will.

Moes gettin' hoes

The SF-based NPR station KQED is running a series by The Kitchen Sisters called “The Making of…” about, well, pretty much anything you’d care to make—from a pot of tea to something that is uniquely SF: Homobiles.

Homobiles is a donation-based dispatch-only transport service for the LGBT community. If you’re in that demographic, your chances of getting a ride from a taxi at club-closing time are low. Homobiles fills that gap.

It’s an interesting story, and I love the way the Kitchen Sisters let the participants tell it. The audio runs more than seven minutes, but it’s worth it.

I especially like the one rider who understands why regular taxi drivers might not want customers who leave behind body paint, glitter and sequins. “You can’t get that stuff out.”

Really—God bless SF.

Nocturnal WHAT?

So this commercial for Smirnoff came to my attention by…well, you don’t really need to know that. I don’t believe it’s running in the US; if so I’ve not actually seen it on TV.

However, I find it…interesting. Because I don’t exactly know what it’s telling me. I mean, you’d think that if they wanted me to ingest their product—which is, after all, an alcoholic drink—they would, you know, say so.

Instead, I’m apparently being urged to…paint my body multiple colors, fill a grand piano with ice and throw fruit at fans? And evidently, only at night.

Psychic inflation

Hmm, it seems that nothing is immune to a rise in the cost of living here in the Silicon Valley. You’ll recall the cosmic confluence on El Camino Real of businesses involved with freshening up your inner and outer personas.

Well—the price for psychic cleaning has gone up:

Here's looking at you, kid

It was 70 years ago today that one of the all-time classics of romance, wartime intrigue and just sheer verve premiered. Casablanca opened at the Hollywood Theater in NYC on 26 November 1942. Since it was a film about the fragile encrustation of normalcy plastered over the underlying desperation and fear in Vichy North Africa, its premiere was moved up from Spring of 1943 to coincide with the Allied invasion of that territory in November.

Casablanca did well both critically and at the box office, right from the beginning. It’s consistently ranked amongst the greatest films of all time on any number of such lists. I myself watch it at least a couple of times a year—sadly, no longer with a bottle of Cordon Rouge (which is what Rick & Ilsa drank at La Belle Aurore to keep the invading Germans from getting it in 1940), but maybe with a glass of Mumm Cuvée Napa. & I find new aspects to enjoy every time.

When you think you’ve memorized every possible interaction between Rick, Ilsa & Renault, there’s still plenty to explore. I especially get a kick out of the minor characters—many of whom were played by European actors who fled the Nazis in their respective countries. Carl the waiter (S.K. Sakall), Sascha the bartender (Leonid Kinskey), the Leuchtags (Ludwig Stössel & Ilka Grüning) on their way to America. (Perhaps most ironic: Conrad Veidt as Major Strasser.) Watching them in little vignettes gives me something new to discover every time. The expression on Sascha’s face when Rick tells him to take the drunken Yvonne home—and come right back; Carl pulling an extra cordial glass out of his pocket—along with the best brandy—having anticipated that he’d be invited to share; the Leuchtags practicing their conversational English.

I also really love the music war—“Die Wacht am Rhein” vs “La Marseillaise”. It’s symbolically heavy-handed, but, damn, does it have style. That’s worth the price of admission right there.

If you want to revisit Casablanca, TCM will be showing it on 6 December. Set your DVR, put a bottle of bubbly on ice & settle back to enjoy.

Month of writing dangerously, Chapter 5

Heading into Week 4 of NaNoWriMo, and I’ve now clocked 61K words. Since the goal of the exercise is to complete 50K words by 30 November, I don’t feel quite such a sense of urgency to rack up the word count each day, although I am still averaging about 2000 per.

Because my oeuvre is a detective story, and I didn’t have the benefit of six months’ solid research into my location (still undetermined city in Northern England), police work (specifically as practiced in the UK), forensics (basic as well as specific; and don’t even refer me to any of the scripted TV series as being legitimate resources) and various other aspects of the genre, I’ve developed a way to ignore those pesky little issues & crack on:

Whenever I run into something I don’t know, I insert place markers and write around them. So the manuscript is splattered with [city blah-blah] or [forensic blah-blah] or [investigative blah-blah]. A week ago, acting upon instructions of The Voices (you know—the ones who cooked this story up in the first place), I ensconced my two main characters in a tapas bar. And, since I’ve never actually eaten tapas (although I did once see Rick Steves eat them on TV), I just stuck in [tapas blah-blah] until such time as I can find such an establishment locally and have a legitimate tax-deductible writing-related expense.

I also had a [rioja blah-blah] because my only experience with Spanish wine involved offerings that reminded me strongly of the Bulgarian rotgut we used to have at history department parties at William & Mary. Perhaps someone can enlighten me on what I might like to lay in—also by way of tax-deductible writing-related expenses.

The Voices forced me to make my American researcher besotted with spreadsheets, which is a great trial to me, because I believe their use for every possible purpose in the business world is the clearest sign of the End Times the Almighty could have sent us. So I have a whole shedload of [spreadsheet blah-blahs], as well. A former boss of mine—who does not play a market researcher on TV, but actually is one—has kindly offered to help me out with (and I quote him) “the spreadsheety goodness”, when I’m ready.

That, of course, will be some time down the road, especially as he is also participating in NaNoWriMo, and is obviously cranking away on his own. (41K words as of yesterday—yay!)

However, considering that I’m ahead of the game, word-wise, if I feel like slacking off a bit and playing with designing a state-of-the-art kitchen with Italian appliances and cabinetry, or trying to hunt down what a coroner’s inquest report looks like, or the logistics of Desert Storm—well, then I do.

The spreadsheety goodness can definitely wait.

Thanksgiving memories

I’m hoping that your Thanksgiving holiday is filled comfort, generosity and a lot of pleasure.

To contribute to the last, I’m sharing a clip from one of the Thanksgiving episodes of The West Wing.

I also recommend the clip on President Bartlet and the Butterball Turkey hotline. But that's considerably longer.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Consuming passion

Since we’re heading into the holiday season, which means we’re also into the turbo-charged consumer and culinary frenzy season. So I think we should start it off with this: The Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog.

When I was a child I occasionally wondered what parents would say when their kids asked, “Mom/Dad—what is it that you do?” and the answer was something like “Make dishmops.”

And I also wondered what people in the Korean or Indian factories thought of Americans as they packed cases of Smurf dolls for shipment over here.

But we’ve clearly moved way, way beyond Smurfs and dishmops to polished Italian alderwood acorn-shaped twine holders and Hungarian grain-sack stockings and potato scrubbing gloves.

Ah, look—you just can’t make this stuff up.

If you can remember the 60s...

Yesterday’s post about the Seattle Police Department’s helpful hints to the public about what to expect from the new law allowing possession of small amounts of marijuana gave me a case of the munchies for…Arlo Guthrie:

Don’t know why, really….

Seattle slew

In the wake of Washington voters approving a ballot measure decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana, the Seattle cops are taking a pragmatic view of how to approach the shifting winds, so to speak, as least as they’re able to determine them.

This being the self-proclaimed vortex of anything technological, naturally they’ve posted their guidelines online.

It’s called “Mariwhatnow?”, a guide to what SPD thinks will be happening come 6 December, when the law takes effect.

I see that the same folks who with every show of distaste and reluctance control the sale of hard liquor (in state-run liquor stores) are going to be in charge of the legal sale of grass. That means that the hours will be so limited and arbitrary (depending on each outlet’s management) that the consuming public probably won’t have to worry much about being caught with any discernible amount of Super Skunk in its trunk.

But SPD has certainly shown more than a kilo's worth of sense of humor.