Lost: Via Domus

Someone got to say it first on at least one message board, but it's a good point. Lost Via Domus, the Ubisoft video game based on the series is a little like the whole Nikki and Paulo story arc.

Like the series of Lost paperbacks, the Exposé episode and those immediately preceding it in Season 3, Via Domus introduces a new character aboard Oceanic Flight 815 who's quickly off on his own adventure, wending his way through the island's familiar landmarks, interaction with the main characters and his own cryptic flashbacks.

That new character is you as you play first person non-shooter, and fairly quickly you discover you're an amnesiac photojournalist with at least one thug on your tail. Your objective is to unlock your memories about a girl who periodically appears Christian Shepherd like--or Kate's horse-like--in the jungle and in your memories.

I didn't think I'd really like the non-canonical story, but for me, it all works pretty well and it has some definite pluses.

Story pace
What is it like, 100 days we've had spread out over 3 1/2 seasons? Much of the familiar plot line material is playing out around you in the game. You're busy wandering in caves or the jungle while the first encounters with the Others are taking place, explosives are being acquired from the Black Rock, the hatch is being opened and Sawyer, Jin and Michael are taking off on a raft.

That peripheral exposure while you're being sent on mystical vision quests by Locke and getting shot at in the jungle, really gives you a feel for how fast everything is supposed to have transpired.

In the midst of your quest, you also have to take a tour of the Swan hatch, a great walkthrough experience because it lets you see how everything's laid out from the computer room where you have to enter the numbers at least once to the kitchen and living quarters. You get to browse the books but not the album collection, but you can't have everything. There are only so many megabytes available, right? (The authenticity of the game with some cool in-game clips is disccused in this IGN video featuring the developers.)



The #$%@&*^%* Spots
I've found two #$%@&*^%* portions of the game so far and I think I'm just past the midsection. A lot of players discussing Via Domus in forums seem to agree with me.

There are the #$%@&*^%* electrical panels in which you have to modify fuses to either reverse electrical flow or disperse it appropriately. I don't know what should be inferred from the fact that Oceanic Flight 815 and the hatch utilize the same basic panels. I solved a couple but went to a walk through for the others because trial-and-erroring fuses had a dangerous level of stop-me-from-playing potential.

The other portion that's a little frustrating is an area where the difficulty is achieved by repeated incursions of the #$%@&*^%* smoke monster. Enough! you want to say after a while.

Still and all for me if not for the Doom generation, Lost: Via Domus is a cool adventure and puzzle game and it's a fun if not required experience for the Lost fan. Hopefully it will tide me over until the return of this season.

Maybe by April 24 I will have managed to get past the #$%@&*^%* smoke monster.

Lost in Space and in Hulu

Hulu.com, the NBC/Fox venture to bring tons of free shows to the web, has been talked about for a while and I discovered last weekend it's live. That was about the last time I was really productive in off hours come to think of it.

I've watched the occasional episode of Lost while sitting at my computer, The Office on Netflix, or NBC.com, but I haven't made the transition to really watching a lot of web TV. The web connection's in the office not the den, and I'd have a guy come out or string a wire in the attic myself or figure out one of those wireless hubs. Anyway...

Hulu with it's friendly interface and limited commercial interruptions makes for pretty good office-swivel-chair viewing for me. Is it the tilting point? Perhaps. Slate suggested recently it may be the future of television and the edge of new social networking. Viewers will be able to collectively vote on the best episode of The Simpsons ever and things of that nature.

It's certainly like we've always heard TV would be some day. A menu of the programs we want, all on demand.

For the genre fan
There are many choices for the science fiction fan and some for the horror fan, as well as those who want to catch up the brilliant satire of American Dad and The Simpsons.

My favorite offering is Lost in Space. I was a Lost in Space kid. When it went into syndication and started airing on our local TV station when I was in first grade, I counted the days until its kickoff and watched every afternoon without much of a discerning eye.

I was a kid so the later, garishly colored and hopelessly goofy episodes didn't really bother me, and in those days generally they seemed to air shows in kind of random order. I was a little surprised one afternoon when something that seemed like a news show came on in the Lost in Space time slot. After a few second it became apparent it was the first episode, introduced in documentary fashion.

Hulu offers the slightly more serious and somber Season 1 including the first full pilot w/out the robot or Dr. Smith. That was later recut to introduce a then-sinister Dr. Smith, foreign agent and stowaway on the Jupiter 2.

If you're not nostalgic, there's still much to be found. Battlestar Gallactica episodes -- new, classic and '80--are available.

There's also Sci Fi's Invisible Man, he of the quicksilver rage; the new and just slightly underrated Bionic Woman featuring the co-star of BBC's stupendous Jekyll as Jamie Sommers; Flash Gordon; The Pretender; I Spy; Chuck and many others.

There are also interesting things to check out. I haven't watched yet, but in addition to Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is included, and the episodes on Hulu include a Harlan Ellison-penned installment "The Price of Doom." The producers must have changed his original because it's credited to Cordwainer Bird.

Mystery fans can also find much to enjoy including the unbelievable first season of Murder One and on the horror front there's the old Night Gallery though it's not the best package of shows you could hope for from that series that frequently adapted tales from the pulps including Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model."

If you have a speedy web connection check it out.

A few words about promises

I had a longer post here earlier. I'm wearied by some of the back and forth political discussion so I'm capping it all here except for these links.

The next post will get back to the matters like which episode of "Lost in Space" currently on hulu.com is best.

Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher

Living Wealth Better Than Money from Yes Magazine

A Good Song

When I was a reporter, I was apolitical.
I have always been cynical. Even as a young man.
I'm not so young anymore.
I'm not a reporter these days.

I live in a world torn by war.
In the wake of a mortgage crisis fueled by greed.
In a country where corporate lobbyists write laws.

Here's a song I heard somewhere.

Addendum

Will.i.am on why he wrote the song.

Books I Should Have Read in the '80s: Kane by Douglas Borton

Do you have books waiting around for you to read them? Doesn't everybody?

Kane by Douglas Borton has been on my shelf, or actually various shelves in various residences since it came out in 1990, so technically it's not an '80s book but it is part of that '80s horror wave.

I bought it new because I was intrigued by the premise and had liked Borton's Manstopper, but in spite of its great premise I've just kept not getting around to it until now.

But it's a great read. I'm not finished but I trust it will all come together well. It's about a mysterious stranger who wanders from the California dessert into a dying town and decides to speed the process along.

Only about 25 people still live in Tuskett, Calif., once known as Desolation. After a brief pause to get his bearings, the mysterious Kane starts picking off the population. Why was this never made into a movie? Could have been a great, gritty documentary-style chiller.

The novel offers some great characters along with page-turning chills. It's broad, small town cast of characters reminds me of the flavor of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot.

If it's on your shelf but neglected, pick it up, or look for it and see what you think.

Does my forehead feel a little warm to you?

I think a bout of hypochondria is finally starting to wane for me. I should be back to feeling invincible again sometime soon.

I guess it's a product of getting older and being exposed to information about health screenings, early detection and warning signs. I know it's a good idea to get checked out for things you might have, but it's psychologically hard -- on me at least.

My uncle's, sister's grandfather's cousin had what so you want to do what?
Checking for possibilities is probably a good thing. It's preventive. You'd be surprised how many older doctors hate the word preventative, which at least in online dictionaries is listed as a variant of preventive. I've had them open conversations with it. "If you ever write the word preventive you should do it correctly." Kind of reminds me of this broken record caller we had in the newsroom.

"You people aren't capitalizing the word pope," he told me once.

"We do if it's in front of a name like John Paul. Or Paul. Just not if it's a stand-alone noun," I said. Couple of weeks later about ten of us in the newsroom were sitting around talking because there was no exciting breaking news to cover, and it turned out everyone had the same conversation with the guy.

I don't know if there's a preventative measure for that kind of behavior, but I do work on crossword puzzles when I'm not digressing. I also sometimes use the less-preferred variation on a word just to be rebellious.

People can have heart attacks at any age
Anyway I can't say that avoiding screenings is a good idea, even if you're pretty sure there's nothing wrong with you, but I do think it's important to try and think there's nothing wrong with you.

It makes living in the now easier. Get too caught up in "what you might have" and it discourages long-range planning as well, which also is not a good thing.

What you might have also makes a lot of people say: "Well, anything's possible, but I think it's unlikely you're having a heart attack."

Christine said that once when I was 30 and had had coffee, a Mountain Dew and the notion that "30-year-olds have been known to have heart attacks."

If 30 year olds can have heart attacks, I can imagine a whole lot of things older guys can have and there's this thing called the Internet where you can read about all kinds of diseases.

I Went to the Renaissance Fair and What's on the iPod Because of It

It's been ages since I've been to a Renaissance festival. I was overdue. Huzzah!

We went for the jousting Sunday at The Four Wind Faire and stayed for The Brobingnagian Bards, an Austin-based duo performing Scottish and Irish drinking songs with the period instruments and the upbeat humor you hope for in such venues.



I was happy to discover they had a website, one member has a podcast and they're well represented on iTunes. They're veterans of science fiction conventions as well as festivals so there are Jedi tunes in their repertoire as well as many an Irish tune.

My favorite song, being a cat owner, is Marc Gunn's solo effort Danny Boy, to the tune of Londonderry Air, sung by a cat owner roused in the wee hours by his feline friend.

Reality Check

A pretty good movie called The Night Listener is on cable right now. It stars Robin Williams as a fictionalized version of Armistead Maupin upon whose novel the film is based. In it Williams is plunged into the quest to solve an emotionally wrenching mystery behind a literary hoax.

It's based on a true story involving a book called A Rock and a Hard Place, a purported memoir, that actually saw publication though in the film the book never does.

The revelation last week that another memoir, Love and Consequences, is really a novel should not come as any great surprise, I suppose. It's a new literary tradition and is on the heels of a similar revelation of a few days ago that Misha Defonseca did not really escape Nazis to be raised by wolves as she claimed in the 11-year old memoir Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years.

It would seem the reality craze that has polluted commercial television has spread to publishing and the reading public. One article I read about Love and Consequences noted publishers will look at a memoir quicker than a work of fiction, I suppose because readers are seeking to find the thrill and emotion that they suspect only a true story will bring. The kind of love and emotion they see on say The Bachelor I suppose. I loved it in the defunct, scripted series Studio 60 that Aaron Sorkin had one of his characters call a reality development chief "vice president for illiterate programming."

Ironically, these literary scandals would seem to confirm that fiction can deliver powerful emotional experiences. Editors and initial readers clearly have found rich reading experiences in the hoax narratives mentioned above and those such as A Million Little Pieces. Believing them to be non-fiction, millions have been engaged and enthralled.

Perhaps publishers and readers (some readers) have just forgotten what the novel can do and how it can strike at the heart.

I'm not defending hoaxers but fiction. I believe James Frey did try to sell his book as a novel first. Wasn't it the same story when he started claiming it was true?

I believe truth matters and if a book is claimed to be true it should be. I've had friends who said it didn't matter that A Million Little Pieces was not true, it was still a good read.

If it was a good read the wrenched the heart, why not publish it as fiction? OK, it's about a few dollars more, I know.

What if we could just convince readers to remember that often a novel can deliver more in the way of truth, that it can be richer and engaging with it's portrayal of multiple characters and inner lives and sometimes metaphor can speak more than words.

King Lear was kind of based on a true story, but it's kind of the writer's embellishment and not the movie-of-the-week aspects we hang on to, and I watched The Night Listener with interest, even though it was based on a novel and not a memoir because it explored a perplexing case and gave a potential explanation of the hoaxer's soul.

A good book doesn't have to be non-fiction. It just has to be true.

Addendum

This is a great piece from Slate on this topic.

Lost: Flashes and Tears Before My Eyes

(Spoiler warning: This post reveals information found in the Lost episode "The Constant" and thus spoilers to the mysteries of the show thus far.)
Just a few days after I noted that Christine sometimes thinks I get choked up too easily at TV shows, comes "The Constant," one of the best episodes ever of Lost ever. It was penned by the show's producers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.

I've already acknowledged the reunion of Rose and Bernard was a hanky moment, but as the wicked cool Lost Diary that chronicles each episode movement by moment summed up this installment's final seconds:

9:58 -- Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring ...

9:59 -- "Penny?" -- Desmond

10:00 -- If you're not choked up right now, I'm sorry -- we can't ever be friends.

In a mythology-rich episode we discovered some characters such as Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) are unstuck in time, and we discovered that his long-lost girlfriend Penny is a requirement for his survival-- time-hoppers need a "constant" present in past and future to prevent total meltdowns. Whoa! And Penny's dad was bidding on a ledger from the Black Rock, the ship somehow deposited at the center of the Losties' island.

As his Billy Pilgrim-like escapades began to threaten Desmond's life, we discovered Desmond needed at least voice contact with Penny to survive. "1996 Desmond, get a phone number where you can call Penny in 2004!"

In true Lost "everything happens for a reason" fashion who should be on board the "rescue" freighter where the affected Desmond found himself gradually goin' south but former Republican Guard communications officer Sayid Jarrah--who, by the way, doesn't need a gun, buddy! Sayid was able to fix damaged radio phones and get Des hooked up on a long distance call with none other than Penelope Widmore.

What a fabulous storytelling arc to convey all of the information the writers had to impart. Deep science fiction concepts wrapped in a love story.

So I'm sitting there watching and thinking "Christine's going to chide me if I cry. Christine's going to chide me if a I cry" and then I look over during:

9:58 -- Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring ...

9:59 -- "Penny?" -- Desmond

and tears are streaming down Christine's cheeks.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is writing. Bravo!

Holy Smoke! I'm a low ranking nerd

I don't know which is worse, being a nerd, which I freely admit in my profile, or being a low-ranking nerd.

I have a new PC at work and I was setting up the default search on my Internet Explorer Browser. (Hey, it's what they gave me. I have Firefox as well.)

Setting up the default requires you to do a search for the word TEST. And I ran across a nerd exam, which I promptly had to fill out.

Here's what I got:




There were a lot of questions about the periodic table, which I contend are not necessarily definitive.

But anyway, that's my ranking and it's now official.

What Was the Question Again

Questions can make for interesting challenges in fiction writing. Yeah that's great if the hero wins the throne and takes his place after the battle. But what if he didn't take the throne after he wins the right? That'd be another story...

Questions make interesting challenges for life as well. The Table of Free Voices facilitated via Dropping Knowledge sought to pose 100 important global questions.

Last night Christine pointed me to the Vicki Robin blog, and a post about a new effort to rank the important questions of our day.

Via a Survey Monkey Survey everyone is invited to vote on top questions in order to boil those down to 10 which will be discussed during Conversation Week March 24-30.

Since we live in interesting times, it seems a worthwhile way to spend a few online minutes. Just mulling the questions is a good exercise.

The link to share if you're of a mind to is http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=vZIiOzEV1pL0LV_2f17vLcLQ_3d_3d.

Tearing Up

Christine says I tear up too easily at TV shows and movies. You be the judge. I tear(ed) up when:

• James T. Kirk is stealing the Enterprise to save Spock in Star Trek III and James B. Sikking tells him: "If you proceed with this you'll never sit in a captain's chair again," to which Kirk, without hesitation, responds: "Warp speed, Mr. Sulu." If you're a TOS fan, you know what I'm talking about. Captaining a starship is everything to Kirk but he says f*** it to save his friend.
  
• Jody in Family Affair works tirelessly to save Mr. Osaki's ill bonsai tree because he believes its health will determine whether or not Mr. Osaki survives his journey back to Japan to see his family a final time. Jody pulls the tree through though all hope seemed lost and finally gets a letter with a photograph of Mr. Osaki back home.
• The allied POW team chooses not to stage their planned escape during the soccer game halftime in Victory with Sylvester Stallone, Pele and Michael Caine. Instead they decide to play the Nazi team to the game's fruition in occupied France. They win with some play that includes magnificent moves by some of the world's best soccer players in small roles. The Paris crowd is so thrilled that they rally, shouting "Victorie, victorie, victorie," and tear down the stadium walls, thus facilitating escape for the heroes anyway. (I guess I should have said spoiler warning if you havn't managed to catch that film on cable sometime in the past 25 years.)
  
• The moment I realized in Brother Bear that the mother little Koda is looking forward to seeing again is the same bear Kenai killed. Christine says even Monty the Cat who was at my side as I watched that was teary eyed, though he claimed: "No, no there's just something in my eye."
  
• When Bernard and Rose were reunited in Lost. Christine teared up at that one too.

Those are just a few, but I guess they're illustrative.

Lessons From My Reporting Days - Editors Never Make Mistakes

Once, back when I was a reporter, when Reagan was president, the editors came into a meeting, with a spool of paper. We had long continuous feed rolls that fed into dot matrix printers in those days.

The city editor rolled the spool out along our conference table so that it stretched its full length.

"These are all the mistakes that have been made in the last two weeks," he said.

And by errors, he meant things that were actually wrong i.e. words spelled wrong, but he also meant deviations from AP style.

Sacred Texts
Moses was given the Ten Commandments in one hand and the Associated Press Stylebook in the other, or so it seemed.

The book is like one of many style guides that tells how to do things for the sake of consistency so that everybody isn't doing their own thing as far as a.m. vs am and the like. It would be print anarchy without the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, The Chicago Manual of Style or... ah ah ah AHHHH AHHH ah ah The Associated Press Style Book. (One-nine are spelled out. After 10 you go to digits. STAB are the street names you can abbreviate. St., Ave., Blvd. and so on.)

The spool wouldn't have been nearly so long without AP style errors. AP style was sacrosanct. Except when it wasn't.

"This is a case where our style supersedes AP style," the editors would say, usually when you called them on a point like whether or not to capitalize Antichrist. Did I mention I covered religion? Antichrist came up a time or two.

My first real life lesson in how editors are never wrong came long before that, however. I got in this pie fight, you see.

On the Pie Front Lines
Candidates for city judge and people in the media were pitted against each other on the Fourth of July in a pie eating contest the first year I was a reporter.

Everyone sat at a set of tables, and there were a bunch of pies with really thick cream toppings. I'm sure there was a time limit, but that became irrelevant because there were radio guys there.

The world was a more interesting place when you had local radio guys.

I got hit in the head with a banana cream.

From one direction.

Then I got hit from the other, and I wasn't the only one getting hit. There was pie to left of me, pie to the right of me...the air in front of me was thick with pie.

I gave as good as I got, coconut on a morning news guy, Boston cream on a candidate. When it was over everyone was wearing pie, and I did a half a league, half a league back to the newsroom to write of my adventure. A poet warrior!

They ran the story with a picture of me throwing pie on the front page. On the jump they ran a picture of a couple of candidates. The cutline--we journalist types called them cutlines, you probably thought they were captions--identified candidates.

One was the winner, the only guy who kept eating when everybody else was in battle. The other guy was just sitting there, but the cutline said he participated in the pie fight.

His supporters started calling around noon.

"He did NOT THROW ONE SLICE OF PIE! I was there! He is being falsely accused."

I didn't read the freakin' paper in the morning before work, so I had to find it and see what it said. I didn't remember giving any specifics about who threw what.

"Hmm," I thought, when I found a copy. "Wonder who wrote that?"

It was an editor of course, in an effort to polish my sparkling prose.

"I didn't write that," I told the city editor.

"Let me check on it," he said.

He talked to the editor who'd rewritten the line and came back.

"He said it was in the body of the story."

Now, in the story I noted that the guy who won was the only one who kept eating. I knew that because he won. They gave him a ribbon or something.

I didn't know who else was fighting because I was getting hit in the head with pie from about, let me see, one, two, three...there was that one guy from TV...five..NINE directions.

But because the editor had extrapolated from "ONLY CANDIDATE A KEPT EATING" that everyone else was fighting, it was my fault he changed my cutline and made it wrong.

The Moral of the Story
I didn't get in any real trouble. The falsely accused candidate laughed when we called him about it. It was after all A FREAKIN' PIE FIGHT. Sure it wasted food, but that meringue would've melted long before those pies could have been shipped to anyone hungry.

I walked away from the situation chastised and much wiser.

Think about it when you watch the news or read the paper. Reporters and editors are just humans.

Lisa Kalvelage, "Murder One" and Situation Ethics

I can't help getting a little choked up every time I hear Pete Seeger's "My Name is Lisa Kalvelage." It's a musical transcription of 1966 remarks by the real Lisa Kalvelage, who had been a child in Hitler's Germany. She explained at a rally against the use of napalm that she had come to understand responsibility and "mass guilt."

When asked about Hitler's actions in Germany and where she was and where her parents were when various events occurred, she had no good answer and was initially denied an exit permit from Germany.

She stood at the protest May 25, 1966 that delayed the delivery of napalm and stated she was there because she didn't want to be asked by her children and children's children where she was when key events occurred and what she did about them.

These are certainly points that resonate with me in this, our present. I think about that especially as torture is discussed in so many corners.

I'm no fan of coddling terrorists, but reportedly, and I've only read this in a blog, not the Congressional record, my Congressman said he was OK with torture if it saved lives.

That's situation ethics of course, a classic case of the end justifies the means.

It's a path I don't think we need to go down as a people.

In the old and brilliant legal mystery series Murder One, Stephen Bochco had his lead character Ted Hoffman tell his younger associates: "We don't treat murderers well and give them fair trials for the murderers. We do it because it makes us better people."

As I sit and contemplate it all, I'm compelled to ask, is torture what it takes to feel safe?

Sadly, it's not always only terrorists who get tortured. Sometimes it's just cab drivers like Dilawar, focal figure of Taxi to the Dark Side.

Like Lisa Kalvelage, I've felt "forced to start thinking on this theme."

Dilawar was 22 years old when he died in 2002 in U.S. custody, guilty apparently of picking up a fare, of working at the best job he could find.

When I was 22 I worked as a reporter because it was a job that let me write.

Where was I, and what was I doing December 10, 2002?

I don't remember. But I was safe.

Is my life worth more than Dilawar's?

Bad Karma

Everyone encounters difficult people. I once heard a minister note that the difficult people a minister counsels are difficult everywhere.

They have to:

• go to stores
• to banks
• come by newspaper offices to place announcements about public events
• work somewhere and thus be co-workers.

We used to have a couple of people when I was at the paper who had such hair triggers everyone went on alert when they walked in. And everything they ever needed posted as a free announcement went wrong. No one set out to do it, but everyone tried so hard to please them that something went South. Sometimes even the corrections went wrong.

$#!+#{^0$ I Have Known
I had the realization the other day that I know several people these days who do the same things, and yep, things always get messed up.

Recently I discovered myself smoothing over a rift that was years old, a misunderstanding that came after a blow-up that kept some materials owned by one party out of reach for years that could have been put to good purpose.

At the same time we had another incident that went wrong in a domino-like fashion because allowances had been made for another person whose passive defiance had become legendary. Turned out the rule that was waived to accommodate was there for a reason.

Notes to self:

• Karma is indeed a biatch.
• Don't be a jerk, or things get screwed up for you.
  

I just thought it was funny - Sarah Silverman on Kimmel With Damon

I didn't catch it live on Jimmy Kimmel, but a friend pointed me to it online, and I just thought it was funny. It's bleeped but beware the language and see if you LOL. Frankly I thought Matt Damon's knowing smile was great.

Jury Duty: And To Think I Could Have Spent the Day in a Kilt

I got cut from jury duty today. I don't know how it is where you live, but I always find it a bit grueling, kind of like a cattle call.

But I go in the interest of my civic duty, and you know, to avoid a bench warrant. I had a call to be an extra for a period film, so I had to turn that down for the privilege of being a part of the judicial process.

I'm not sure what the costume would have looked like, but I'm pretty sure it would've been a dress given that men didn't discover pants until like the 16th century, right?

A dress in 40-degree weather vs. cattle call.

OK, maybe I got the better end of the stick this time.

"Please know we all appreciate your showing up for service," they announced in court. "Don't go to the bathrooms or the vending machines while the judge is on the bench."

So I'm sitting there, working my way through the three-hundred-forties of The Historian, and they say well we need danged near everybody that showed up today so settle in.

My heart sank.

Then after a while they came back and said well good news, 78 people are going to get to go home.

So they call a pool of 22 and I'm not mentioned. Whew.

Then another 22.

Then a pool of 42. I'm not one of names 1-41.

Then they drag out the forty-second name, but it's not me. Yippiee!

But No. 42's not there.

I'm thinking - "Issue a bench warrant. There are some guys in uniform outside just waiting to go look for somebody."

But they just tell us stay put.

In The Historian the hero was taking particular interest in the name Ivireanu. The reason? It's a long story.

Finally they come back and announce: "The judge can live with 41."

Apparently generating another random name would have taken a court order or something.

Sometimes, I'm here to tell you, red tape is a good thing. Lunch time!

I'm a Luddite Again

I love my iPod in all its 5G glory, but I'm affeared the cult of Mac is sort of leaving me behind.

Christine and I went to prepaid cells about a year ago, reasoning we could actually spend far less money that way. I got a cool race car shaped phone out of the deal, but Alltel has been somewhat less customer friendly than Chad would lead you to believe.

"Well, you're just going to have to take it an Alltel store," I was told in one e-mail while trying to correct a problem with my voice mail.

In spite of that, generally that plan has served us well, but it's also made me a liar.

I always said I'd jump at the chance to meld my cell and my iPod. Until they melded cell phone and iPod. That was the closer for a lot of people in my office, generally younger folk who'd been getting by with Rios or whatever until then picked up iPhones.

Suddenly my 5G is the dinosaur, yet I'm not looking to upgrade. The iTouch-sized screen is attractive, but I'm told there's slightly less reliability or quality to its touch screen, and I don't want to go back to a $70 a month plan when I can get by on far less even if I text. My race car phone has a handy extra set of buttons for just that so you don't have to deal with the whole A now B now C business of three letters to a key. Chad did OK on that point.

Now I'm told the SidPod--you have to name them you know--won't support say a rental of 300. That would be kind of cool, eh. "Spartans, tonight we dine in hell," right on the ol' pod screen.

I'll survive, but I'm in the tech backwaters again.

New Coat Weather

We've had cold weather in my neck of the woods, though not as cold as what Wayne is telling me they're getting in the Windy City.

I bought a new coat after Christmas. My serious coat, replacement for the car coat I've owned for years, no slave to fashion, I.

Generally I keep three coats. My old man loved jackets and I could wear his size, so I used to have lots of jackets. Christine, ever a fan of frugality and moderation, put an end to that.

So there's a light jacket, a leather jacket like I always wanted 'cause I used to see Neil Gaiman wear one at conventions (kidding) and a heavy jacket to wear when it's cold and rainy and thus not right for the leather jacket.

The new one is a nice, black wool from Nordstrom's. My navy-with-a-leather-collar coat's headed for Goodwill.

I'm not given to sentimentality over inanimate objects, but I think I'll miss it.

I bought it in a department store in San Antonio in the mid-nineties, no kidding. I wore it through winters while I was still a reporter then when I was a reference librarian/freelance writer and I've continued to wear it as it's been needed since I've been a gentleman ad man.

It got me through blustery nights in London and terrible weather in Dublin, cold days and nights in Chicago including deep dish pizza at one of Wayne's haunts.

Through chilly weather in Seattle and San Francisco.

I wore it on trips over to clean out my parents apartment after my dad died and my mom was no longer able to live alone.

It's just a thing, but seen me through a lot of cold.

My Old Man's Ghost Story

I think I've mentioned here that what imagination I have came from my father. He always saw the largest rabbit, the biggest fish, was once given a lift by one public enemy or another--or perhaps a 1930s traveling salesman just trying to scratch out a living during the Depression, but if you were my dad you had to open your mind to possibilities.

At any rate, the old man could tell a tale or offer a writer's embellishment even though he never picked up pen.

Once upon a time, he had occasion to visit an old, deserted house, just a kid out of adventures. He never had a dime for a pulp magazine, read Tarzan and Dracula from the library and saw the occasional movie.

Slowly he turned
Half terrified, he crept into the old house, explored a few rooms and then came upon a tin lid, left behind perhaps when the previous owner vacated for better prospects.

Unwittingly he invented his own Frisbee, picking up the lid and sailing it through the house. It curved along through the air and disappeared into another room where he heard it hit the wall then thump to the floor.

He was past being scared then and was just looking around, but a second later the lid he'd clearly heard hit the floor came sailing back out of the other room.

He didn't wait to find out more. He let his feet do the thinking and beat a path back home.

What ifs
Now perhaps there was a hobo sequestered in that old house. Perhaps the lid didn't hit the floor but simply bounced back.

Or perhaps, the house's previous occupant was still there, not wanting to be disturbed by intruding boys in search of adventure. Ooooo WHEEEEEE oooo!