Library heat

Over the past week or so, we’ve had several rainstorms coming across the Silicon Valley. One of them accounted for me stepping up to my ankles last Friday in a huge puddle in the parking lot of the Korean café where I often go to write. My feet squished half the day.

It’s the very rare day like that that makes the two-sided fireplace (gas) in the Sunnyvale Public Library make sense.

Or it would if they hadn’t reorganized the area to hold book shelves instead of armchairs. It’s really odd—you have to edge your way around the new books on display to get close to the fire.

I suppose it’s the thought…

'Nuff said

As you know, as an antidote to a completely and utterly crap week (which seems to have slopped over into the past couple of days; but I’m counting it as overflow from before and therefore banishing it to the past), I checked out the complete series DVDs of Due South from the Mountain View PL, and have been watching them, episode after episode.

I’ve not yet got to one of my favorites, “All the Queen’s Horsemen”, which features Leslie Nielsen doing his looniest best to “maintain the right”. But I’ve been thinking about the song they sing in it: “Ride Forever”—it’s the RCMP’s Musical Ride, see, and they’re on this train about to be gassed by an Insane terrorist. Well, watch it yourself.

But, while I’m waiting for a new external DVD/CD drive for my laptop (just don’t ask, okay?) to arrive from Amazon, I’ve watched a couple of YouTube clips with the song in it:

As something of an aside, I sometimes slip a cog when it comes to picking up words in lyrics. I was beyond voting age before I realized the opening line in that one chorus from Messiah is “All we like sheep” and not “Oh, we like sheep”...

So for some reason, although I did hear the Mounties proclaiming “you can’t keep horsemen in a cage”, I swapped out the G for a V, and started wondering why you can’t keep horsemen in a cave? You could, you know. If it was a big enough cave. Depending on how many horsemen you actually, you know, had. And whether or not they had their horses with them. I'm just sayin'. 

But then I started wondering what other letters I could swap in for the G to find things you can’t keep horsemen in.

Cake—kind of hard to keep horsemen in a cake. Unless…no, I’m not coming up with any kind of a cake you could keep horsemen in.

Cane—nope, can’t do that.

Care—well that’s just being silly.

The one that I kind of like, though, is cape. You can keep horsemen in capes, can’t you? I would actually like to see horsemen in capes.

Baby mama

So, it’s looking as though Prince Harry may be off the hook, since the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have announced that they are expecting a child, who will be (either male or female, thanks to recent changes to the rules of succession) third in line to the British throne.

I personally find all the media hoo-hah a little extreme. According to this report in the Guardian, there’s been round-the-clock coverage of the “event” of the sort you’d expect for a cataclysmic earthquake or presidential election. Except that there’s no one to interview and nothing to report beyond (apparently) that the Duchess is glued to a throne of a different sort.

Yes—the cat sneaked out of the bag because Kate has been hospitalized for severe morning sickness.

Evidently broadcast executives have decided that they need multiple news teams on the scene—at a hospital to which they have no access—in order to speculate six ways from Sunday (boy? girl? name(s)?) about things that in a normal world wouldn’t be considered news outside of a zoo with a pregnant panda.

Even the Guardian itself managed to hawk up a hairball of nonsensical factoids: “It is understood she is less than 12 weeks pregnant, possibly only two months. The duchess is likely to be taking anti-sickness tablets and have a drip in her arm so she can receive fluids intravenously.” (Plus: look at all their sidebars.)

Well, duh! This is worth scrambling “11 production crew for the hospital watch” by ABC? Our ABC, not the Aussies’?

I’m just seriously dumbfounded that people are losing their minds to this degree over something that has less and less relevance to the real world. (Talking about maintaining that whole monarchy thing as anything other than a symbolic nod to tradition.)

On the other hand, Harry’s probably out with his mates downing a few and feeling massive relief that there’s soon to be one more body between him and the throne.

Motive for mayhem

I’ve been working with an organization that’s trying to help people shorten the job transition time & consequently lower the economic & emotional cost of being out of work. I mostly like it because what I’m doing as a product manager has a visible effect on the service, & I think it’s a worthwhile effort.

But it’s not without its challenges.

I’ve described the executive director as being like a puppy at a barbecue—always running off after another scent. When I mentioned this description to a person in the psychology business, she commented, “Sounds like he has attention deficit disorder.”

Well—I guess that would be the clinical definition of being a puppy at a barbecue.

Those who know me will get a laugh out of the karmic kick of me having to continually bring another CEO back to the topic at hand at every meeting, & having to continually make the same case for something he’s agreed to in the past but wants reconsidered within the intervening 48 hours.

But I’m thinking it’s hard to top the three-hour meeting I had with him the day before Thanksgiving, when I mapped out some new functionality by filling up a wall-to-wall whiteboard three times (draw it out, photograph it & erase it) with functional flow & arrows looping all over the place for a new feature set he wants in place by the end of December.

As I was working on the last layer, trying to see what might be missing, & continually asking, “What happens then?”—he suddenly chirped: “What is your degree in?”

“Hanh?”

“What’s your degree in?”

“I have a bachelor’s in European studies & a master’s in US history.”

“It’s just that you have…such a logical mind.”

“Well—the whole point of having a liberal arts education is that it teaches you how to think.”

“Yeah—but you think so logically. For not being an engineer.”

Yes, I, too, am wondering why I even bother.

Month of writing dangerously, Chapter 6

NaNoWriMo ended officially on Friday. My final tally as of then was 75,031 words.

I still have miles to go—I reckon I’m about halfway through the plot, and I still have a lot of blah-blahs to fill in. And a shedload of research required to finish both. And then I'll have to edit the living daylights out of it, because this sucker gives new meaning to the term "rough draft".

Still—I’m pleased that I hit my goal, that I got started & that I can still drive my malignant narcissist bastard bad guy into the ground.

A girl’s got to hang on to something.

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.