August 2002 Archives

Yesterday, my posse and I went to Speedway Raceway, an indoor cart racing track in a warehouse in south Phoenix. For only $16—because I got a membership for $20—I did fifteen laps around their quarter-mile track. Best time: 35.60 seconds. Also, I came in last due to a blunder in a tight turn. D'oh!

The speedway is an awesome place to race small little carts. It's got a winding, tight track and the carts go about 30-35 m.p.h. in my estimation. Plus, it's got a tunnel—you've got to love a tunnel. One of these days I'll put up pictures for you, the viewing public.

Looks like the gift is a mousepad. Oh yeah, and the chance to stand in line in front of an Apple Store.

I have filled out the entry blanks to possibly win an iMac, so I'd like to believe that this line to drop off the blank. We'll see.

I'm standing here in line near the Apple Store at Biltmore Fashion Park waiting for who knows what. There is probably 200 people ahead of me in line. This is all part of some Mac OS X 10.2 hoopla. Since I've already got 10.2 installed (it came via upgraded delivery today instead of tomorrow), I can only chalk this up to general insanity.

Recently, I listened to an audio book version of Dave Barry's Dave Berry is Not Taking This Standing Up. It reminded me why I stopped reading his column: his humor is entirely based on fantasy and misrepresenting reality.

If you're not familiar with Dave Barry, he writes about real things but makes up so many of the details that he must insert "And I'm not making this up" whenever he presents a fact. What's more, the details that he makes up are not subtle.

To a younger or superficial reader, this is funny stuff. I am now neither and I find his columns formulaic and reliant on "humor crutches." I can read one occasionally and even occasionally laugh, but I will never sit through six compact discs worth of his dreck. The speaker, though, did an amazing job of reading—one of the few positives about the many-weeks-of-commute-time experience.

Over the course of the homeboundedness, I had a chance to read Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. Let me start by saying that I love her Hercule Poirot mysteries. I devour them at every opportunity. I think it is strictly because of David Suchet, the English actor who played Poirot on A&E's series of the same name. Side note: if you ever get a chance to listen to him read a Hercule Poirot mystery on an audio book, don't pass it up. He does all of the voices for the story and he has an amazing ability to convey their various emotions orally.

The novel takes place on board a train called the Orient Express, which runs from Istanbul to Calais. The story unfolds, though, as the train is snowbound somewhere in Yugoslavia. A murder, naturally, is committed under very peculiar circumstances, also naturally. The story's twists and turns are too numerous to mention here, as it is rather involved. The ending was surprising and unexpected, though plausible. All in all, it was a worthy read especially if you like mysteries (and haven't read this one, Christie's most famous).

Not a particularly insightful review, to be sure. The interesting aspect of reading Murder on the Orient Express was the act of reading it. Two things struck me as unusual and worthy of comment.

1. Christie inserted a jibe at the mystery genre. As she did in Death on the Nile, one of the characters points out a clue and Poirot is made to remark about how that would be a clue in a mystery novel and thus was obviously planted to throw him off the track. It was interesting because she is consciously pointing out a cliché of the genre and simultaneously saying that she wasn't going to fail her readers by relying on such pabulum.


2. She had Poirot explain the method by which he arrived at his conclusions. At one point in the novel, Poirot and several investigators ponder the case while deep in thought. Poirot's thoughts are hidden, while Christie focuses on the other investigators muddled and rambling thought process. Later on, at the climax of the book, she has Poirot give his amazing account of the crime and then proceed to let us in on what he was thinking about earlier. Admittedly, I haven't read much detective fiction (Sherlock Holmes and a couple Hercule Poirot mysteries), but I haven't encountered such an epistemological examination before. It makes me want to read some of her other works and see if this is a regular part of her plots. If it is, I'm sold!

I think I like mysteries for that very reason. They commonly lay all of the facts out before you, the reader, but they obscure the essential facts in a blizzard of noise and circumstance. The astute reader can usually get substantial parts of the puzzle correct, while the layman gets to witness an astute evaluator of facts solve it. I have a book that likens historians to detectives and I am becoming more and more convinced that that thesis is basically correct—except that the historian has a much harder task because more of the facts are obscured or even obliterated.

I've been using AdWords Select for the last week to advertise my pottery painting studio and it has been working well. Click-throughs are at 1.5% on the terms I've purchased and I've spent a little over $1 so far! It helps to buy a general keyword and narrow it through ad copy.

I bought "pottery painting" for example and wrote my copy to say "Our northeast Phoenix pottery studio ..." This serves much better than buying "pottery painting phoenix" to achieve the same effect since the former keywords are much more used. Yay!

My longer term strategy is to get rid of the Fuseboxing and use straight CFMX pages instead. Not difficult to do, but time consuming since each page will have to be re-composed. Also, must remember to plan for contingencies—old links, bookmarks, etc.

Ugh, I have to use Internet Explorer to post these entries instead of my preferred browser, OmniWeb. For some reason, OmniWeb's not posting forms well or not interpreting the JavaScript that Blogger uses.

It's been a pretty rough couple of days. On Monday, my wife and I suffered a miscarriage. My life has pretty much been on hold since Monday at 2:15 p.m. when I got her call.

Conceptually, I know that our fetus (which we affectionately called Sunshine) was a potentiality. Emotionally, it's hard to reconcile that view with the fact that that particular potentiality was going to be an actuality (or should have been, damnit!). One day you're pregnant and the next day you're not.

I've heard people talk about miscarriages and I always felt for them, but I was always operating on the potentiality premise. Now I truly understand the significance. The important thing is I wanted it to be born. It has left a void in my life. It's like if someone stole my car (only much, much more)—I was planning on going to work today and now I can't. Well, I was planning on having a son or daughter in March and now I can't.

And it hurts.

My friend Larry and his friend (I'd consider him my own too, now) Sean just left this morning. (This morning is more of a conceptual notion since this post is technically going out in the morning.) Larry just finished law school and is moving to Washington, D.C. to clerk for a judge.

They were in town because Sean is accompanying Larry on the San Diego to St. Louis leg. Sean is chronicling the journey on his site in his inimitable style. In the Day 2 entry, Sean makes some pretty absurd claims about Laser Quest. Just because the guy gets a lucky game (scoring 1000+ points), suddenly he's an expert about laser game strategy. He speaks derisively about people who find a "magic hiding place"—that's me he's referring to, by the way. You should have seen my spot though. It had awesome views of four different areas and I ranked at second place (behind Sean). All in all, I had a great time shooting my friends and various small kids.

I don't usually do this, but I rented a movie based on Roger Ebert's recommendation. I don't do it because Ebert's view of movies is not mine: he likes naturalistic depictions of real life and I like stylized depictions of the way life should be. I wish I would have read the review a little closer because the fact that it is adapted from a Thomas Hardy novel should have been a red flag.

It's a Western about a town faced with the coming of the railroad in the form of a railroad surveying party. The party is treated reverentially and the town is opened to them in a bid to secure a place along the railroad. At the same time, the movie is about the owner of the town (basically) and the difficulties he faces maintaining his rule. Finally, the movie is about a decision made by that ruler long ago and the repercussions it holds for the present.

The plot and theme are iffy in the sense that there are several of each. This dilutes the power and effectiveness of the plot and theme. The cinematography, on the other hand, is spectacular. You really get a feel for how dreary life was in the old West. So, in the end, I'd say that this movie is worth renting, but not a second time.

Shallow Hal had an interesting premise. What if a superficial, obsessed-with-breasts bum saw pretty women as ugly and ugly women as pretty. Okay, it's not a particularly amazing premise, but it's unique. Far too many men (and women) are focused on looks to the exclusion of character and personality.

That would be a movie possibly worth watching. This movie is not that other movie. It's the story of a superficial, obsessed-with-breasts bum who is still superficial and obsessed with breasts—except that he now sees fat and ugly women as beautiful and with large breasts. In other words, whereas he used to be shallow about the outsides, now he's shallow with the insides. It doesn't really attack the superficiality of the whole thing.

What's even worse is that the movie sinks to playing all of the worst stereotypes about fat people. Believe it or not, the movie actually degrades fat people. The protagonist, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, is made to crush steel chairs, tilt canoes, eat incredible meals, and tip cars. You would think that a movie like this would swing the exact opposite way and be overly sensitive to the obese. If you saw There's Something About Mary, the Farrelly Brothers other major movie, then you know that subtlety is not their strong point.

Watched Shallow Hal and The Claim over the weekend. I'll update this entry with my thoughts about each later today.

Neat Invention Alert: the Hypersonic Sound System broadcasts sound in a tight narrow beam that only those in the path of that beam can hear. And no one else. Think of it as a speaker that acts like headphones. This is heady stuff and really reminds me of the personalized advertisements in Minority Report.

The article discusses some of the applications including military uses to deafen the enemy. I could also see this enabling custom settings in movie viewing and just about any other use where headphones are currently used.

ColdFusion Best Practices from Benoit Hediard. This page covers some of his personal guidelines on using CFCs, custom tags, UDFs, and cfincludes. Site has some promise: he just needs to flesh out the Flash MX area. I liked his explanation of rich Internet applications.

Watched U-571 last night. For some reason, I've been watching a lot of war movies lately—Das Boot, Crimson Tide, and The Caine Mutiny most recently. I think it's because I've wanted to watch realistic action flicks, and war movies provide such action and are generally quite realistic. Movies like Die Hard or anything with Arnold Schwarzenegger are realistic in the sense that the situations are possible, but they're not realistic in the sense that they're terribly unlikely to ever happen.

I liked U-571. I'm not a big fan of Matthew McConaughey and I can't stand Bill Paxton, but the action was powerful and the quality was compelling. Like Das Boot, the director captured the feeling of being hundreds of feet underwater with a thin membrane of steel protecting you from the enormous water pressure as depth charges explode ever closer. I can completely understand why submariners served short stints and frequently left the service. Their courage and fortitude is (and was) amazing. In fact, I almost was a submariner myself—my vision defects earned me a "permanent medical rejection" instead.

I am curious, though, about the accuracy of the story itself. It purports to tell the story of an actual event, but it's hard to believe that a submarine crew would be dispatched to steal an Enigma machine in 1944 when, if memory serves, Great Britain had broken the Enigma code years before and the Battle of the Atlantic was all but lost. I may be wrong about the timing of the story; if it were 1941 instead of 1944, then it would make sense. But the characters in the movie were all US Navy personnel and we weren't participating in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1941, so I have to think that it took place in 1944. Maybe I'll look further into it one of these days. Uh huh, add that one to the list. *ahem*

Last night I watched The Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart and Fred MacMurray. It was shown on TCM's Essentials series. The series, hosted by Rob Reiner, showcases movies that have had a profound impact on moviemaking—the movies that we as Americans should see. Or at least that's the idea behind it. I like the idea, but I think their selections omit some really great movies. Such omissions are the nature of any selective list, I guess. TCM also justifies their selections with a short vignette.

I liked this movie, just as I liked A Few Good Men. It tells a tale of personal responsibility and independent judgement. The premise is that the captain, played by Bogart, of a minesweeper during World War II is a paranoiac, who gradually loses his grip on reality and threatens the safety of the ship. The officers of the ship become more and more despondent about their captain's mental state, but put off ousting him for fear of the punishment for mutiny. In the duress of a typhoon that is taking the Caine apart, the captain turns inward and avoids any decisionmaking—holding firm to his orders even though his stance will sink the ship. The executive officer asserts his authority to depose the captain and guides the ship to safety. We find out that his swift action saved the Caine where two other ships caught in the same typhoon sunk.

The officers are prosecuted for conspiracy to mutiny once they reach land. The dramatic climax occurs when the captain gets caught up in his paranoia and launches into a lengthy tirade in front of the court, thereby confirming his mental unbalance. (Reiner notes that this scene was the inspiration for the "You can't handle the truth" scene with Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.) The officers of the Caine could have shirked their moral responsibility and they wouldn't have been held accountable by the Navy, which condones blind obedience. Instead, they took the bold move, fully aware of the potential repercussions.

The movie has faults, such as the insertion of a saccharine love story without much integration or necessity and the post-acquittal speech of the officers' lawyer, but they are not terribly significant. Bogart, nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for his performance, convincingly portrays the mental decline of the captain and really conveys the paranoid's emotional state.

Today is my birthday. I can't believe I'm 28. Wow.

As you can see, it's been awhile since I've posted last. I kept the first post to both document my early entry into the blogging world and to show that I oftentimes lack good follow-through. I'm going to try to make a sincere effort to post more often now.