Running After My Hat

Real-Life Dialogue

January 28, 2009 by John 5 Comments

He: So what kind of car did she get?

She: I don’t know, I forget. It starts with an “E.” Some kind of American car.

He: […prolonged thoughtful silence…]

[time passes]

She: I wish I could remember what kind of car it was.

He: Well, the only kind I could think of that started with an “E” is “Elantra,” but that’s a foreign—

She: I’m not sure it starts with an “E.”

He: Oh… Well, since she got it from a Chevrolet dealer, is it a Chevrolet at least?

She: I don’t know!… Name some kinds of Pontiac. A sporty Pontiac.

He: Well, there’s the Firebird but I don’t think they make them anymore.

She: They don’t. And it’s not a Firebird anyway.

He: […]

She: Name some more Pontiacs. Sporty ones.

He: Uh… Grand Prix?

She: No, it’s not a Grand Prix… Maybe it is a Grand Prix.

[dials phone, talks briefly]

She: Yes. It’s a Grand Prix.

“Shoulda Thoughta That.” And the Worst. Songs. Evah.

January 27, 2009 by John 7 Comments

One of The Missus’s ongoing laments involves the infamous curve, which she seems forever ahead of. “Did you see,” she’ll say to me, “that [insert name of formerly unknown person] just made [insert some number which includes many zeroes and a currency symbol] from [insert random clever idea here]? I can’t believe it. That was my idea!”

Over at the Writing Well Is the Best Revenge blog, a recent post starts out by touching on a similar phenomenon: encountering ideas they’ve never had, but wish they did. Specifically, they talk about the Publisher’s Lunch e-newsletter, which provides reports of recent book deals. BIG book deals.

I know it’s, what, masochistic? Not because I begrudge anyone the fabulous deals they made–oh no way! If books are getting purchased and publishers are humming along, I’m all for it.

No–what’s masochistic is the constantly recurring thought that I am unable to suppress. And that is: oh–I should have thought of that.

Or worse: Oh, I COULD have thought of that.

We won’t even discuss “I DID think of that, years and years ago, but didn’t do anything about it” [Ed. note: viz., The Missus’s lament] because that way lies true madness. (Two little words: Animal Planet.)

Which leads them — gotta love it, someone else is easily distracted, too — to consider the announcement of the sale of Christopher Bowles’s book, Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart:

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A Career Made of Fiberglass, Foam, and Fun

January 26, 2009 by John 5 Comments

[Gotta get back into the online rhythm again after a couple days off… digging out the draft of a post I’d meant to put up some time ago…]

If I had my own personal MacArthur Foundation-like setup for rendering “genius grants” to people in all walks of life, I would give one tomorrow to Mark Cline. (Today’s, of course, I’d give to myself.)

I first learned of Cline in a post on the io9: Strung out on science fiction blog, where I encountered a post with the arresting title “The Alternate History Theme Park Where Dinosaurs Fought in the Civil War.”

At right is one of the photos used in that io9 post. From the text which accompanies it:

…roadside attraction creator Mark Cline has imagined an entirely different kind of Civil War science fiction. His fiberglass creations tell the tale of a group of Union soldiers who discover a lost valley of dinosaurs in Virginia and plot to use them as weapons against the South.

The attraction, called “Professor Cline’s Dinosaur Kingdom,” imagines a lost chapter from Civil War history. It supposes that in 1863, a group of paleontologists inadvertently stumbled upon a valley of live dinosaurs. The discovery comes to the attention of the Union Army, who, recognizing the destructive power of the giant lizards, decide to capture them and unleash them on the Confederate Army. Naturally, it results in Jurassic Park-inspired carnage.

(I encourage you to visit the io9 post to see more photos.)

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The Satisfactions of the Small, Found in the Large

January 23, 2009 by John 5 Comments

From whiskey river:

Only horizon and sky are given up easily. Take the numbing distance in small doses and gorge on the little details that beckon.

(William Least Heat-Moon)

Not from whiskey river (one of The Missus’s favorite poems):

I Am Too Near

I am too near to be dreamt of by him.
I do not fly over him, do not escape from him
under the roots of a tree. I am too near.
Not in my voice sings the fish in the net,
not from my finger rolls the ring.
I am too near. A big house is on fire
without me, calling for help. Too near
for a bell dangling from my hair to chime.
Too near to enter as a guest
before whom walls glide apart by themselves.
Never again will I die so lightly,
so much beyond my flesh, so inadvertently
as once in his dream. Too near.
I taste the sound, I see the glittering husk of this word
as I lie immobile in his embrace. He sleeps,
more accessible now to her, seen but once,
a cashier of a wandering circus with one lion,
than to me, who am at his side.
For her now in him a valley grows,
rusty-leaved, closed by a snowy mountain
in the dark blue air. I am too near
to fall to him from the sky. My scream
could wake him up. Poor thing
I am, limited to my shape,
I who was a birch, who was a lizard,
who would come out of my cocoons
shimmering the colors of my skins. Who possessed
the grace of disappearing from astonished eyes,
which is a wealth of wealths. I am near,
too near for him to dream of me.
I slide my arm from under the sleeper’s had
and it is numb, full of swarming pins,
on the tip of each, waiting to be counted,
the fallen angels sit.

(Wislawa Szymborska;
translation by Czeslaw Milosz)

Finally, an undisputed master at the reverse: finding large things in the small (click Play button to start):

[audio:billcosbychickenheart.mp3|titles=’Chicken Heart’|artists=Bill Cosby]

A Cat’s Departure

January 22, 2009 by John 10 Comments

Cat nap, c. 1993

[With a cat — Dilly, I’m told, but to me the stripes
rather say, Nameless — sometime in 1993.]

Dilly first entered the life and home of The Missus-to-be sometime in the spring of 1993, shortly after I myself moved down here and some months before we moved in together.

As with her predecessor, Nameless, Dilly probably would have gone anonymous for a while — we’re notoriously indecisive about most things, singly and as a couple — except for one happy circumstance. She needed happy accidents at that point, too. She’d been in the animal shelter with her little brother; The Stepdaughter-to-be had gone there with a friend who was looking to adopt. The friend pointed the two little kittens out. (As I recall, the backstory to that point was that Dilly and her brother had been abandoned by the side of the road.) The Stepdaughter-to-be, on behalf of her mother, “adopted” Dilly. (To this day, she remains haunted by uncertainty about whether the little brother got adopted, too.)*

When she arrived at The Missus’s place, then, the kitten still had on one foreleg the ID bracelet from the shelter: D1L, it said, and voilà — with the substitution of a letter for a digit, she had a name.

(She acquired a couple nicknames over the years. Dillybutt, for one — a reference to the “elevator butt” that kicked in when you so much as approached with an about-to-pet-her hand, sometimes when you merely spoke her name. Later, there was Dilgoyle: the cat who’d be sitting on a windowsill, as if carved there, when we got home from work or a trip.)

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Forward Bravely, into the Past!

January 21, 2009 by John 8 Comments

This March — the 12th, and isn’t it interesting I remember the exact date? — marks my 30th year as a computer guy.

When I started out at AT&T, my job title was Member of Programming Staff (with a digression into Managerhood); at my present job, I’ve been a Distributed Systems Specialist, a Business Systems Analyst, and a Database Analyst. (Oh, and throw in whatever you call a departmental Webmaster, too. Probably exactly that.)

And then I’ve built and maintained other Web sites, as well, and RAMH is, like, my fourth or fifth blog since 1999-2000 or so.

By now, you might think, I’d be right up there in the vanguard doing the Pied Piper thing, urging everyone else to join the cyber/systems/virtual revolution.

Er, no.

Into my Inbox recently drifted a plaintive email from a young guy with a computing question. In purchasing a new computer, it seems that he had to choose between two options: a souped-up whiz-bang up-to-the-minute model? or scale back on the computer itself, and spring for a really nice monitor?

I counseled him to choose Door #2, introducing it with the (perhaps surprising) claim:

I tend to be conservative in matters of computer hardware: I don’t want my computer to make my heart race; I want it to be INVISIBLE.

That pretty much sums it up.

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The Real January 20, 2009 Post

January 20, 2009 by John 4 Comments

In the previous post, I sort of blew off the significance of the day as if I didn’t take it seriously.

It’s not a joke. I’m trying real hard not to get too puffed up and all “Gee aren’t we Americans wonderful?!?” (As a column in today’s paper said, we don’t even know yet whether he”ll be a good President, let alone a great one.)

And yet, and yet…

I’ve been with my current employer since 1993; until today, they’ve never offered the use of conference rooms and video facilities to watch an Inauguration — except possibly for the simple but godawful swearing-in in November 1963.

And truthfully, I have not been able to stop smiling.

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Everyday Heroes

January 20, 2009 by John 6 Comments

Like nearly everyone seems to be, I’m caught up in what might be called Onauguration Fever.

And — coincidence? you be the judge! — Warner Brothers and Fox recently settled their legal tussling over the upcoming Watchmen film, allowing its release as scheduled on March 6.

Under the circumstances, the time seems right to celebrate the existence of real everyday heroes, nay, superheroes.

I do not speak of policemen, firemen, teachers, even soldiers. I speak — of course! — of those officially designated as such, at least by themselves, in the World Superhero Registry (slogan: “Coming Out of the Phone Booth”).

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Happy Birthday, Mr. Poe

January 19, 2009 by John 5 Comments

Today would’ve been your 200th birthday. Hard to imagine, eh, especially for someone with such a predilection for death at a young age?

For those who, like me, have something of a perhaps unhealthy attraction (and is there any other kind?) to EAP’s works, I heartily recommend two sources:

Daniel Hoffman’s Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (yes, seven Poes). Sometimes maddening to read, until you sit back and realize how closely that… that maddeningness models the effect of reading Poe’s work itself. Hoffman is fully aware of Poe’s weaknesses as well as his strengths, his gimmickry as well as his style, and does not let himself be gulled into slavish hero worship. But the conclusion is inescapable: Poe (sometimes despite his worst instincts, sometimes because of them) was a master.
Harry Lee Poe’s Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories. The Missus gave me a copy of this for Christmas, but I didn’t get around to reading it until last week. Amazing. (Expect a full review here or, more likely, at the Book Book blog in a few days’ time.) It’s been nominated by the Mystery Writers of America for a 2009 Edgar Award in the critical/biographical category.