Domestic tranquility

So, since I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I appear to have fallen down a time wormhole.

Or possibly I mean a black hole.

I’d pegged the metro Seattle area as pretty much the mother ship of the PC industry. So I expected to have at least the techno-amenities I was accustomed to in the Old Dominion. (I’d also assured those who, on hearing of my move, intoned, “I hope you like rain”, that I’d lived for three years in London, so the rain didn’t bother me. & I expected the architecture in Seattle to be better.)

Silly me.

I’m currently parked in rented digs that remind me of Britain’s National Health Service: probably cutting edge for its time; but its time was 50 years ago. It’s in the style known here as “a rambler”; back where I come from it would be called a rancher, but whatever. Single-story, three-bedroom, one bath, carport, 1100 sf.

The owners are four brothers, who inherited it from their mother not quite a year ago. They “fixed it up” & put it up for sale for $250K over the assessed value. That would be $680K. Surprisingly, it languished on the market for several months before my agent showed it to me & we asked if they’d be interested in renting it for the nonce.

(See above about ONE bathroom.)

Well, yes—they might indeed be interested. After much to-ing & fro-ing through agents to the Brotherhood, we finally worked out a deal (of sorts).

Another thing people assured me back in Virginia was that I’d love Seattle because, “the people are so laid back.”

Evidently they were talking about service providers.

It took more than three weeks to get a landline, a couple to get cable.

Verizon didn’t have The Rambler on their grid (see below), so I had to get connectivity through cable (to which I’m opposed on principle, but what can you do?). Comcast had to run the line out from the street & drill a hole in the wall to give me TV & Internet. Seems The Brotherhood had ripped out the connection when they “updated” the place.

I should have paid attention to that, because after three weeks of grotesque calls to Verizon (before they finally realized, “gee, we don’t SERVE that area”…), when the Qwest technician finally showed up (after more surreal calls, but over a period of days, not weeks), he also had to run a new line out from the street—into the “Bell Systems” box, which obviously dates from the 50s as well.

I signed up for delivery of the Seattle Times—it’s not a first-rate newspaper, but it is the local rag, & I always try to support journalism. However, it’s been two weeks since I subscribed & I still haven’t had a paper show up in my driveway.

Then there’s trash… After three-&-a-half weeks & three calls, I finally have bins for trash pickup. I’ve told them that I’m only paying for service I can access. Since I’m informed that the Russian mob runs the company, I may end up sleeping with the fishes in Puget Sound.

I wonder if they’ll be as lackadaisical about delivering the cement overshoes as they are about giving me bins. (BTW, this being the capital of Green-ness, I have three wheelies: trash, yard waste & recyclables. Plus a little plastic container for “food scraps”. I feel like I’m back in WWII; should I start a Victory Garden?)

Actually, I need that container—a garbage disposal unit wasn’t part of The Brotherhood’s idea of updating The Rambler. In fact, a lot of their choices seem odd to me:

• The circuit box is in what I take to be the master bedroom; it’s completely exposed, no cover.
• The sole bathroom has two sinks. The Brotherhood installed new faucets (those butt-ugly “brushed nickel” finishes), but one of them doesn’t return to true. Instead of fixing it, they simply instructed me how to leave the handle so it doesn’t leak.
• They installed a new shower head, which comes to the bridge of my nose. (I’m 5’6”) Plus, it leaked; I had to haul out my trusty channel locks & tighten it. This means no one ever turned on the shower head after installing it, much less thought about actually, you know, using it.
• The counter in the bathroom is 36” high. Think about it.
• There are also only two towel racks in the sole bathroom; they’re 15” wide.
• They installed new linoleum in the kitchen, but can’t have done anything about the under-flooring. When you walk on it, it kind of bounces. (’Kay, I know I need to lose weight, but still.)
• The redone kitchen has a total of five drawers; none is wider than 8”. (For the Y-chromosome-challenged, go look at the drawer where you keep your silverware.)
• The three bedrooms have single wall uplights; the bulbs in them can’t be more than 8 watts.
• Neither did the Brotherhood bother with updating the actual electrical outlets; there’s barely one socket per wall. I have drop cords & power strips snaking around the hardwood floors like strings of spaghetti after a college pasta party (without the tomato sauce). I hope to God I’m not creating a fire hazard.
• When they redid the kitchen, for some reason they left a 110-volt outlet for the dryer (for which, with a washer, I had to negotiate). Even I know that’s totally whacked.
• Perhaps my favorite is the wall o’ windows they installed in the living room. Not one of them opens.

I have to say that I haven’t roughed it like this since I lived in the UK. No garbage disposer? (At least I do have the dryer, so I don’t have to spread my wet laundry around the living room once a week. Which is good, because it would probably take a couple of days to dry.)

But it’s not all domestic bliss. The whole area is…interesting.

Traffic’s every bit as bad as the metro DC area. But their carpool lanes are completely, well, bizarre. Instead of being consistently on the left side, on some highways (not all) they’re on the right, & they start & stop without apparent reason. Which means that you’ll be driving by yourself perfectly legally, & then all of a sudden you’re in a diamond lane & you have to get out to avoid being nicked. Plus, there’s all the turmoil when you want to exit & have to cross at least two lanes to get off.

Seattle hasn’t discovered air conditioning, yet. I arrived at my temporary housing, an apartment in downtown Bellevue, on 18 July to find it a veritable oven. I frantically ran round the place looking for controls to turn down the heat & turn on the AC. But the heat wasn’t on & there was no AC. The week I moved into The Rambler we had temps in the 90s. No AC, no opening windows in the living room, can’t open the doors because the cats will get out. I thought I’d moved to Hell.

Then there’s alcohol. After just about 20 years living south of the Mason-Dixon line, I was so looking forward to being back on the Left Coast, where (among other things) I could count on being able to buy a bottle of liquor in a free market instead of state-run stores (in states that permit anyone to buy & use a gun but consider taking a drink to be tantamount to dancing with the devil; as if dancing weren’t enough of a crime in itself).

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that, while you can purchase wine & beer hither & thither, if you want a bottle of single malt, you have to find one of the dreaded state liquor stores. Well, boo; but what the heck—I found one on the Web & took a pass through it. In 27 seconds.

Washington has managed to accomplish what I just flat out hadn’t thought possible: they’ve made Virginia look positively progressive when it comes to attitudes toward booze. The stock & selection in these places is paltry in comparison to what was available in Virginia. Not that I’m a huge drinker, but I am a Californian, & I’m accustomed to having choices. & variety.

& the ABC stores in the Old Dominion were actually getting better. They opened a second store in Reston (population about 20K) within walking distance, & I killed about 15 minutes there one day waiting for the local hand-made pizza place to open. I just walked up & down the aisles, looking at all the types of tequilas & rums & whiskies for sale.

The operative term there was “aisles”. Of which there are none in any of the Washington state liquor stores I’ve seen.

I don’t know whether there’s a fear that state residents will tie one on if they’re allowed free access to booze & use their lumberjack & salmon fishing tools to go on a rampage, or what. But I assure you that the amount of liquor available in the stores I visited wouldn’t fuel a single frat party.

Something else that gave me pause: one of my employee benefits is free membership in the poshest gym I’ve ever belonged to. You need a map to make your way through the building; they have more personal trainers on staff than a medium-sized city has police officers; there are on-site medical services, a restaurant (‘scuse me, a “bistro”), a florist, a shop & a full-service spa. (One of my colleagues describes it as a casino, & it definitely has that ambiance, with its multiple rooms of phalanxes of exercise machines.)

So I was somewhat gobsmacked to find this sign above the water fountains throughout the place: “Washington State law prohibits spitting in drinking fountains.”

Thing is—if you have to remind people of the blindingly obvious requirements for the basics of decent public behavior, a mere reminder probably isn’t going to do the trick. Plus, I don’t know whether Washington state has a huge problem with people spitting in drinking fountains unknown in other parts of the country, or whether I’ve been drinking water from dual-purpose fountains/spittoons.

Well, I guess it’s going to be a new adventure. I should probably buy a plaid flannel shirt & workboots to blend in with the environment.

Picturing the past

I love old photos. This came through one of my downloads—a rather interesting historical document, no?

Leaving aside the rather grim setting—which might have been a state-of-the-art office environment in 1924, & would probably fetch a couple mil for subdividing in the Georgetown loft market today, even tricked out as it is—the whole arrangement speaks volumes about the workplace.

Those “computer stands” look like cruel & unusual punishment to me. & with their electromechanical guts, I’m betting the noise would have been comparable to Khachaturian working in a tractor factory.

But it’s fascinating that these were all “personal” computing devices—one human, one machine. (I’m not even going to venture a guess as to the processor capabilities for these things.) Twenty-five years later we’d “progressed” to room-sized Univacs & Eniacs—thanks in no small part to Admiral Grace Hopper, a woman with a true gift for numbers & logic. Then we gradually whittled the technology down to mini- & then microcomputer size. Now I carry around a smartphone with whiz-bang capabilities in the back pocket of my jeans.

Another point of interest is that I can make out exactly two men amongst this phalanx of women—not counting the standing guy, who’s obviously overseeing the operation to ensure there are no shenanigans got up to. (Corporate intrusion into your computer activity goes way back, doesn’t it?)

I have this vision of a bell ringing & the serried rows of computer specialists rising in unison & heading off to the loo. Although—you’ll notice there’s no room on these computer stations for coffee cups.

Finally, scroll to the right & look at the denizens of the other half of this office. Three of the four people closest to the photographer (two female, one male), in their non-adjustable wooden chairs at their big, heavy wooden desks, are looking into the lens with distinctly amused expressions on their faces. Are they happy they’re not part of the computer collective? Feeling superior because they could put a cup of coffee on their workstation (if they were allowed coffee)? Anticipating their own close-up?

I dunno. But this makes me feel less whiny about my brick of a ThinkPad laptop in my office with my ergonomic chair.

Feeling noirish

Last week TCM ran The Third Man—I missed the first ten minutes or so, but when I remembered it was on and switched channels, I fell right into the spell as thoroughly as I did the first time I saw it. (That was at an art theatre in West LA, many, many years ago.)

Actually, it knocked me out. I had the TV on while unpacking boxes from the latest move and I ended up bagging the life-organizing and watching—really paying attention to—the film.

I’m not sure it was the plot so much as the characters and the actual cinematic techniques. I’m not a fan of Joseph Cotton; he’s okay. But Trevor Howard as Major Calloway, the chief of the British MP contingent, is understated commanding presence. I love watching him at work.

Plus, there’s the youthful Orson Welles as the elusive, multi-dimensional Harry Lime. The aftermath of all that destruction is a Petrie dish environment for the Lime bacillus, and he thrives as though he’d been cultivated at great expense. He’s not on camera for most of the film, but he—Lime/Welles—dominates the film.

However it was odd watching him run in one scene—you think, “That can’t be Welles haring off like that, not with his heft.” Then you remember this was 30+ years before those no-wine-before-its-time Paul Masson commercials.

I had to keep reminding myself that Welles didn’t direct the film—actual director Carol Reed used so many of the techniques Welles pioneered in Citizen Kane. Those weird camera angles that make you look at things in ways you’d never have thought of doing yourself. And Reed really made stellar use of the black-&-white medium.

The film is incredibly atmospheric—which is a quality I’m not sure you can get outside of B&W. (Well, maybe Chinatown…) Most of it is shot at night; what light there is, is harsh and unforgiving. You really get the sense of the swirling hell post-war Vienna was. Not a shred of that Austrian Gemütlichkeit in evidence. All that ruined Baroque splendour—and it’s not just the Habsburg buildings.

The place reeks of corruption, as happens in defeated territories. (I wonder if anyone will make a Third Man in Bagdad? Or, God willing, some day in Belgrade?) The city is divided into zones run by the four allied powers; the Soviets are angling at every opportunity to push their control, as they’ve done with all of Eastern Europe. Calloway is doing his best to police his patch while avoiding international incidents.

And that’s one of the problems of victory—it’s one thing to fight and win a war. It’s another entirely to occupy the conquered territory. As armies dating back to Alexander have learned. Vienna, with its long history of decline and its pretentious shabbiness is the perfect setting for the story of black marketeering, unashamed opportunism, scrabbling for survival and  yes, even love.

Of course, it’s love for the wrong person. Another universal theme not restricted to post-war settings.

Then there’s that iconic scene on the Prater, where the resurrected Lime explains his philosophy of personal success to his naïve friend Holly Martins. He utters a line that condenses the whole ethos of 1946 Vienna: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

I have to say that zither music gets up my nose. It’s the 1949 equivalent of a John Williams score (the composer who thinks movies are produced solely to provide a vehicle for his turgid compositions). Like a Williams score, it screams plot points at you in case you can’t follow the subtlety of the film.

Even so—if you’ve not seen it, hie thee to Netflix and get it. If you have seen it—it’s high time you saw it again.

Let the Games Continue

It's really hard to get excited about the presidential conventions this year--we've been so enmired in the campaigns for the past two years (recall that John Edwards took up with his videographer in 2006, for God's sakes) that I've long since lost any enthusiasm for the process.

A colleague of mine chastised me about 18 months ago--he said that electing the President of the United States is an event of world-class importance, worthy of months & months of debating the issues & candidates' qualifications. I suppose he's right, although of course issues are always thin on the ground while "qualifications" usually mean slagging off your competition. But after non-stop campaigns seemingly since the last century, I just feel like the kid at dinner who muttered, "Okay, I'll eat my carrots--but I won't swallow them!"

I suppose it would be interesting to make book on how many Democratic delegates get altitude sickness on the floor. Other than that, I'm predicting utter predictability for the next four days.

Dog days...(oops!)

This appeared in my queue a while ago & I sent it round via email. However, today I found it on the company Intranet, associated with an employee-produced cats calendar.

If you've already seen it, it’ll still bear another look. If not--go to.

Just don’t be drinking anything while watching, or you’ll snort it out your nose.

Let the games begin

As you might expect during this two-week period, the WSJ’s Eric Felten (“the man with the best job in journalism”) yesterday discussed the history of Olympic drinking.

He doesn’t include the story of Spiridon Louis, winner of the marathon in the first games of the modern Olympiad in 1896. That may be because Louis stopped at a taverna in the course of the race for a glass of wine, not ouzo, so perhaps that’s considered outside Felten’s remit.

On the other hand he does tell how swimmer Eleanor Holm Jarrett was busted for drinking champagne when she was caught drinking champagne (and shooting craps) with members of the press on the way to the 1936 Olympics. Avery Brundage, who had a somewhat sliding scale of ethics throughout his IOC tenure, axed her as a bad example, notwithstanding her being the great hope in the women’s 100 metre backstroke.

These days that latter fact would have outweighed any crime up to and possibly including capital offenses.

Anyhow, Felten, as is his wont, comes up with a couple of quasi-official Olympic cocktails. Both of which strike me as nauseating, but feel free to use them to test your own personal best in endurance.

The thing that left me gobsmacked was the opening anecdote, about another marathon, 1904 in Saint Louis. Seems Thomas Hicks was crapping out at the 19-mile mark, so his coach gave him a cocktail of cognac, egg whites and sulfate of strychnine. He got another dose closer to the finish.

What I want to know is: there were Olympic Games in Saint Louis?

Why?

P.S. Having just moved into a house in a vintage-1950s neighborhood in Bellevue, I find myself without connectivity at home for the first time in this millenium. Verizon doesn't seem to run DSL to this area and  the cable couldn't be installed until next week. However, this being the metro Seattle area, I'm going native: this is being posted from a coffee shop with free wi-fi.

Sex & politics

Well, the news about John Edwards admitting to a months-long affair in 2006 while running for the Democratic nomination for President (but not while his wife was being treated for cancer, he says)—it got me thinking. As you knew it would.

For one thing, Edwards assured the public that he “didn’t love” Rielle Hunter, although of course she’s 1) eleven years younger than he & 2) 15 years younger than his wife, Elizabeth. So she’s got that trophy thing going for her.

Plus, she’s apparently not suffering from incurable breast cancer.

What gets me about that is he’s basically saying it’s somehow less selfish, arrogant & adulterous to carry on with a woman you don’t care about than one for whom you have feelings. How does that work?

(Also that defense in detail of “& I didn’t do it while Elizabeth was actively fighting the cancer”—who thinks that’s a justification?)

But that’s not the only thing that bothers me about this. What I really don’t get is this:

• For at least the last five years he’s been telling the world that he’s a straight arrow, the embodiment of Family Values & therefore worthy of We the People electing him to the office of Vice President, & then President


• He possesses the added saintly association of having his cancer-stricken wife publicly support his ambitions


• He’s been senator from North Carolina—Jesse Helms country—so has had to walk the straight & narrow path for at least the length of his political career


• He does have that wife & four children

He’s really not generally speaking a stupid man

So how is it he engaged in an adulterous affair with someone he didn’t love in an atmosphere where he was bound to be found out & publicly excoriated?

What is it about men & their sliding sense of morality when it comes to this sort of thing?

Let’s leave aside the ordinary schmo who believes he’s entitled by fiat of the Almighty to share his procreative fluids with anyone with the XX chromosome configuration. The one who thinks marriage vows only apply to his wife, but who either thinks he’s not got much to lose by spreading it around or can’t think that far ahead to any consequences.

The stakes may in fact be high for this guy—lose the wife, the kids, the house; but he’s not going to lose his career or his future in the community.

& forget about celebs who feel entitled by virtue of celebrityhood to sleep with anything animal, vegetable or mineral without consequences. They don’t live in the real world & we don’t really expect them to be capable of spelling “morals” much less have them. In fact, behaving like a Restoration earl sells movies & media, so everyone’s happy about it.

But what’s up with guys who have so much more riding on this than the little woman chucking his clothes, baseball card collection & bowling ball in the garbage? Pols know they’re expected to display the family values they purport to believe in. & they know that if they don’t live up their own hype, their careers are toast.

How is it that they risk not only the break up of their family, but public humiliation, alienation of the voters, and—most horrifying of all—the exodus of those big-ticket campaign donors. You really can lose your job & your career future by giving in to your libido (or your ego—or both). & there’ve been so many examples of that—Bill Clinton notwithstanding.

So what is it that makes a smart guy, who presumably loves his family, who is at the height of his career aspirations, who knows what the consequences are—what makes him put all that on the line to make it with a videographer?

I just do not get it.

Culture vulture

A friend sent round this Yankee or Dixie Quiz. So I took it.

My score came out 80% Dixie (Do you have Confederate ancestors?). Which is a complete crock, because how is it that I could have only THREE answers that are pegged as solely south/southeast and all the rest be somewhere else (with some also the south), and STILL be tagged Dixie?

I mean, I started off #1 as being “clearly Massachusetts, Maine or Rhode Island”. I’ve spent maybe four weeks in Mass, one in Maine and I’ve driven through RI. Go figure.

Caramel I’ve always pronounced the way it’s spelled, and never confused it with the biblical Mount Carmel. (Nor do I refer to the place of Christ’s crucifixion when I mean horse soldiers, for that matter.)

My answer to #3 was “common throughout the US”. Four WAS “southeastern US, but five was “no bias” and six “common nearly everywhere”.

I’ll give them y’all on seven. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

Eight was “all US; slightly favors the southeast”. Nine “common throughout the entire US”. Ten “universal generic term used nationwide”. Eleven, “very strong bias toward the Northeast US”. (Although I grew up in California and never left the state until I went to Mexico in high school, and I never called them anything else.)

Twelve—really, I use both terms, but it’s “all of southern US and Midwest except Great Lakes area.” Thirteen “favored in western Great Lakes region”. Fourteen “used nationwide and in southern urban areas”. Fifteen “most common nationwide except for Great lakes area.” (And I lived in Wisconsin for a while, so I recognized the term used there. I just never used it.)

Sixteen FINALLY got me back home: “used heavily in northeast US and California”. But as for 17—again, in Southern California we never called it anything else, so how did that become “used heavily in Great Lakes and Midwest region”?

Eighteen brought me “this is common throughout most of the US”. How 19 got me “largely a Texas term but also used in the urbanized Northeast”, I don’t know. And for 20 in LA we never called it anything BUT pillbug, so I’m not getting the “Great Lakes region and northeast US”.

Even so—notwithstanding the categorization of some of these terms, how is it I could still come out 80% Dixie, when most of my responses came from multiple areas?

Now, as it happens, I do have Confederate ancestors. Yankee ones, too. You gotta problem wid’ dat?

Working theory

New workforce study out, reported by The Onion. This should resonate with all three readers of this blog.

Leaving aside the point that it’s satire, it reminds me how obtuse asshole bosses can be. I once worked for a woman who was a blonde version of Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss in every respect: ignorance, self-puffery, paranoia, micromanaging, etc.

Yet she cooked up one of those “team-building” outings to Annapolis, which included several Dilbert videos featuring her alter ego as the example of how not to manage people. It never occurred to her that she herself was the object of derision in those videos.

This is something I've wondered about for years: how is it that some people 1)get hired & 2)remain employed when they display no discernible skills, talent or even basic intelligence? I once expressed to a friend this wonder regarding a particular person when I was working in the film industry. She looked at me in amazement & exclaimed, "But, [Bas Bleu] don't you know that when you can't figure out why someone's in the position they're in, it usually means they have photos!"

Well, perhaps. But I'm reasonably certain that some of them--most, but not all, in management--are too stupid to operate the camera. So I still don't get it.

My bad...

I realized after posting yesterday that as Raymond Chandler aged, Philip Marlowe’s attitude toward gin mellowed somewhat.

Terry Lennox of Silver Wraith fame was drunk on gimlets, and he introduced Marlowe to them. He even dictated the recipe: “A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow."

Well, even at half and half, the Rose’s will peel the enamel off your teeth. A professor at Santa Monica City College who taught a course on detective literature made it 2:1 gin to Rose’s. But it’s a delicate balance—do you prefer to risk disintegrating teeth or deadened brain cells?

The Long Goodbye was written in 1953. Five years later, when Chandler published Playback, Marlowe was drinking Gibsons (martinis with an onion instead of an olive).

I can’t see it myself—but then I’m more of a vodka girl.

There’s a passage from Goodbye, where Lennox describes the comfort to be found in a bar at a certain time: “I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar.”

Good luck trying to find that sort of respite at any time in any boozery these days, where the techno pop and TVs blare at you from the instant the bartender turns the key in the door to open.

Terry Lennox—and Marlowe—would not be able to sit in a bar for the time it takes to down a single gimlet in this age. They’d take one look at the cosmos and cranberry martinis and beers with limes in the necks being drunk by poseurs who think their quaff is a statement, not a drink; and they’d have just walked out and gone dry.