Are There Any More Cookies?

Morning Photography

2012-01-16T15:20:00.002-05:00

I ran into the office this morning (voluntarily, even though I was given the option of not doing so) because I was planning to come to campus anyway, and since it was a holiday the elevator was turned off, and I had to take the stairs. I probably needed the exercise (if we're being honest, I could leave out the "probably"), and the stairwell was also filled with photographic opportunities:

I was apparently into that tall, tapering shape today.

I took the photograph of the ladder because I've been trying to take interesting photos of ordinary things after last weekend's experiment, and have met with partial success. There are a lot of photos that I haven't posted because they come out looking as ordinary as the objects in them, but I kind of like that ladder, and I really like this cup that was on the counter in the office kitchen the other day:

It's just a ceramic mug, but I really like the shadows on the curves and the lines in the glaze.

After I left the office (I was only there for about ten minutes) I headed over to the university gardens, where it was very cold and the sun was still coming up, so that I could take the pinhole camera for a walk:

I have no idea what I was going for there. The pinhole continues to be hit or miss, with some pictures under exposed (like the one above) and some horribly overexposed or right on the verge of it (like the ones below):

The red at the bottom is where the overexposure started leaking in. If I left the pinhole open longer, then the whole thing would have gone red, like those are about to, and everything in them would have been unrecognizable.

Not that overexposure is the only thing that makes things unrecognizable. This:

and this:

are photos of the same grouping of chairs, from almost the same angle. The pinhole camera is not good with deep shadows any more than it is with bright light.

It's much better in bright light, as you can see from the not-overexposed part of the birdhouse above or from the photo of these frost-covered herbs:

I took some pictures of them with my regular camera, for comparison:

And then I used the blurry, odd quality of the pinhole to get this photo from inside the rusty truck carcass in the back of the gardens:

That's the view through the windshield, bullet holes and all.

When I ran out of film for the pinhole I took some pictures with my regular camera, too:

and then headed to Walgreen's to get the film developed and to try out my new strategy for pre-empting their unwanted photography critiques.

"Hi. I'd like to drop off this film? It's from a homemade camera, and the pictures will probably be blurry and might be overexposed. Please do whatever you can, and I'll pay for the photo CD either way."

I don't know if it was the offer to pay, or the fact that I gave a whole bunch of information up front, but it actually worked. Walgreen's managed not to critique my photos.

Which is fine, since I'm doing enough of that myself.

Culinary Adventures

2012-01-14T07:54:00.002-05:00

The other day my friend Holly asked what I'd been cooking lately.

"I feel like you're always cooking something, like something fun and different."

That's not true, really, since most of the time I'm cooking something basic, but then another friend asked why I don't write about food on here anymore, and I realized it has kind of been a while since I cooked something and wrote about it. To make up for it, here's a pair of simple things I made last week, and then we'll talk about the adventure I went on where I ate chicken.

Chicken that had a bone in it.

But first, look at these tiny mini calzones I made:

They were stuffed with cooked, crumbled turkey bacon and crumbled blue cheese, and they were delicious and easy. You'll need:

1 8-biscuit tube of premade biscuits
Whatever filling you want to put in there

1) Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

2) Open the biscuit tube. Take out a biscuit and press it flat with your fingers so that you have a flat circle of dough.

3) Spoon filling onto half the circle. Fold the other half over, then pinch the bottom edge over the top edge all the way around. Be sure it's pinched closed all the way around, or your filling will leak out.

4) Poke holes in the top with a fork:

5) Bake for 10-12 minutes, until they look done.

The pea and artichoke gratin I made, from a recipe in "Food Network Magazine", took a little more effort. It started with a roux, and I've mentioned in the past that I have trouble with roux, because I either have the butter too hot or I add the flour too fast, or both, but I think I've finally figured it out. When I had to add the milk, my roux was smooth and slightly yellow, like I think it's supposed to be:

After that I had to add the peas and artichokes:

and simmer for a while. If I make this again, I need to simmer a lot longer, because my sauce stayed kind of thin and didn't reduce down. The recipe in the magazine just said to simmer, and didn't say how long you should simmer for, so I kind of blame them.

The recipe also said that you should make the whole thing in an oven-proof skillet and then put it under the broiler to crisp the cheese on top, but I don't have an oven proof skillet, so I poured the gratin into a baking dish for the broiling, and it came out fine:

Except for the part where it was too watery, but, like I said, I can fix that by simmering longer before the broiling.

We also went out to eat this week, and that's where I had the chicken with bones in it. I've mentiond before that some foods gross me out, but I don't know if I've ever mentioned the problem I have with chicken. I don't like skin, and I don't like meat that comes with a bone in it, so normally I only eat boneless skinless chicken breasts.

This is continuously baffling to my friends:

"What about chicken wings?"

What ABOUT chicken wings? Did you not hear me? Bones! Skin! I don't eat ribs, or t-bone steaks (I don't really eat steak at all, actually), and I think I've only had a bone-in porkchop once, at a fancy restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, down the street from where I saw this horse statue in the back of a truck:

And that was in 2006.

I often say I've never eaten chicken with a bone in it, but I think I have maybe once or twice, if I was out somewhere and no other choices were available. Probably at a wedding or banquet, but it happens rarely enough that when we went out this week for Ben's birthday to Wright's Cafeteria I took a picture, mostly to prove to my mom that I really did eat chicken with skin and a bone:

That was listed on the menu as "BBQ Chicken Breast". Clearly, that's not just a breast. There's a wing or something sticking out of the top there, and it's covered with skin under that crispy BBQ coating. They also had chicken and dumplings on the menu, and I normally would have ordered that instead, but when I leaned over the cafeteria line and smelled the BBQ I had no choice. I was compelled to order the chicken even though I could see that it was horrible and wrong and filled with bones.

And it was so good.

After I peeled off the skin and carefully dug the chicken out:

We're not going to make a habit of this or anything, but I ate chicken on a bone, and it was good.

Office Space

2012-01-08T19:11:00.003-05:00

As Jeannie mentioned yesterday, we opened the residence halls for spring this weekend, which means that I was in the office all day on Saturday and Sunday. If opening is going well, then things are pretty quiet up at the office, and things today didn't pick up until lunchtime.

It's kind of eerie walking around our building with no students. On regular weekends, there's usually someone else around, but classes haven't started yet so most of the professors aren't back either, and I noticed that I had the hallways completely to myself when I got hungry this morning and went to the vending machine in the basement. Intrigued by the odd sense of isolation, I took out my camera and starting snapping random photos, just to see what I would end up with.

Have I mentioned that our building is curved? Because it is:

Based on these pictures it's also a little spooky in a way that I can't quite put my finger on.

Maybe it was just the odd and total silence, but even everyday things look strange to me in these pictures.

It's probably a sign that I need to get outside next weekend.

52, And Then Some: My 2011 Reading List

2012-01-01T11:11:00.001-05:00

I don't know what happened this year. I made my usual resolution to read 52 books this year, expecting to meet with my usual level of success. In 2007 I read 49 out of 52, in 2008 only 44/52, in 2009 53/52, and in 2010 a respectable 52/52, even if I was still trying to finish the last book on New Year's Eve. In 2011, I didn't have that problem. I actually could have stopped reading in October, because somehow that's when I hit 52 books.

My tally for the year is 76/52.

I have no idea how that happened. I didn't do anything special, or set aside any extra time to read or anything. All of a sudden, I guess I just started reading really fast or something.

That said, here's my list for the year, with a warning that I do swear a little in some of my notes, but some of these books deserved a good cursing:

1/52: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom became the first book of the year for me because I was too scared to start a book that long so close to the end of last year. I have no idea what I was supposed to get out of this book. I wasn't angry, depressed, or moved, just slightly annoyed. I'm also not sure why Oprah chose this for her book club. It's pretty anti-the American middle and upper middle class, and wasn't that the target market for her show?

2/52: Amy Sedaris' Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People was cute and funny, but my friend Sara wasn't kidding when she said that any crafts actually made from the instructions in this book would be pretty shitty. I guess it inspired me a little for my crafts project for the year, in which I was supposed to send something handmade to six people on Facebook, but I still haven't met that goal.

3/52: Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol started out fast and interesting, and ground down into "How can this book not be over yet?" territory with a protracted ending that just kept ending and ending and ending. It did remind me, though, that I havent ever toured the National Cathedral, so I kind of want to visit DC for a weekend now. Also, as much as I like and expect shocking twists in books like this, one of the ones here was so ridiculous and ludicrous that it pretty much ruined the rest of the book for me. I have no idea what that twist was, since I didn't include it in my notes, and I'm sure as hell not rereading this just to find out why I didn't like it.

4/52: I reacted pretty strongly to Julie Powell's Cleaving. At twenty pages in, I wanted to punch her in the face. When the book opens, she's already been having an affair for two years, her husband knows about it and forgives her EVEN THOUGH SHE'S OPENLY HAVING AN AFFAIR*, and she doesn't want to leave him because of all the nice things about being married but she also doesn't want to stop having her affair because having sexy forbidden sex is hot. I hate her so much.

They even talk about it. Like she spends the whole night while they're watching movies checking her blackberry, and her husband is like, "Sorry he hasn't texted you all night," and she starts discussing how terribly neglected by her boyfriend she feels WITH HER HUSBAND.

Now that I finished the book I still want to punch her in the face, and I realized that if she is still working in the butcher shop that she was working at in the end of the book then I actually could, because it's only a few blocks from my grandparents' house.

On the plus side, I have to admire her for being honest enough to write a whole book whose basic message is "I'm a fuckup. Also, I'm selfish." She doesn't shy away from it at all. Also, I feel a little bad for her because I know what it's like to be in love with someone to the point that everything makes you think of them and you spend the entire day hoping that they'll call and throw you a scrap of attention and then you drink yourself to sleep because he doesn't. Yeah, I've done that. It sucks. The difference would be that I wasn't already married to someone else when I fell in that kind of love.

And no, I'm not judging her for being a cheating spouse. I've had friends who cheated, I've helped cover up for friends who cheated, and back when I was young and thin and had a full head of hair a guy cheated on his fiancee with me for a couple of months. Clearly, my moral standard is far from spotless in this particular area, but Julie Powell presents us with a husband who has absolutely no flaws. He doesn't lie to her, doesn't beat her, isn't the wrong gender, isn't already cheating on her with someone else; according to her, there is nothing wrong with him and he is perfect, and it's really hard to feel sympathy for someone who has someone who is perfect and still feels like she deserves something more. I'd even be less enraged if this was a book about leaving her perfect husband, but it's not. She wants to have a boyfriend for hot sex and a husband for everything else, which isn't fair to either man.

Also, I learned a lot about butchering.

5/52: Thomas Tryon's Crowned Heads is a set of four short stories about Hollywood stars capped by a very short story that ties them all together. "Fedora" tells the story of an ageless movie star and her horrible secret, "Lorna" is the story of a pinup queen gone to seed, "Bobbit" shows a former child star unable to admit that he's grown up, and "Willie" is the story of an old Hollywood legend alone in his house in the hills when strangers knock on his door. The stories are rumored to be based on specific people, but it's more obvious in some cases than others, and it seems pretty clear that Tryon was not a fan of Hollywood after his time there as an actor.

6/52: Last Christmas I saw a lot of people buying David Sedaris' Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk for kids, but now that I've read it I have to say that a lot of those people probably didn't read the book first. Yes, these are stories about cute little animals that act like people, but they're also cute little animals that get AIDS, cheat on their spouses, argue about racism, fight about religion, and act like people that you wouldn't actually like. I thought it was cute, but maybe for teenagers and adults.

7/52: Peter Straub's A Dark Matter tells the story of a writer whose wife and high school friends all participated in a secret ritual in a deserted meadow in the 1960's without the writer. One kid vanishes, one spends the next 40 years in an asylum, one goes blind, one becomes a professional thief, one becomes the wife of a Republican senator, one ends up a slave to the guru who ran the ritual, and one gets bitten in half during the ritual by something with enormous teeth. The writer, at a loss for a new book, tries to put together what actually happened in the meadow by interviewing everyone who's still alive. It was a interesting, but not horrifying (as promised on the cover).

8/52: Poppy Bright's Wormwood was an interesting collection of short, disturbing stories.

9/52: After my friend Jackie mentioned reading Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, I realized I had it on one of my unread books piles, so I read it, and I liked it. I noticed that there was a movie adaptation, but when I read the synopsis and reviews, I realized that the movie completely eliminates Arthur Lecompte from the story, and merges some of his characteristics with another character. This left me not wanting to watch the movie.

10/52: Curtis Sittenfeld's The Man of My Dreams teaches us that you have to love yourself before you can really find anyone else who loves you. A week after I read it, I couldn't remember anything about this book. It left no impression at all.

11/52: Bill Bryson's African Diary was a short but funny chronicle of his week in Kenya, touring CARE sites. It's weird how the message here, that people in developing nations need help, is the same as in Mountains Beyond Mountains, but reading that book made me want to punch people in the face and reading this book makes me want to go on a trip with Bill Bryson.

12/52: David Grann's The Lost City of Z was a great, educational yet entertaining read. It tells the story of how Percy Fawcett, a legendary British explorer, vanished into the Amazon jungle in 1925 searching for evidence of an unknown, advanced civilization deep in the Brazilian rainforest and how at least a hundred people vanished or died trying to find out what happened to him. The author eventually travels to the jungle to search for Fawcett, too, and while he doesn't find him he does find the Lost City of Z, sort of. Also, I learned that there are bees in the Amazon rainforest that sting you in the eyes ON PURPOSE. Now I have another place to never ever visit ever.

13/52: I read "Real Housewives of New York" Countess LuAnn's book, Class with the Countess, which I got for a dollar at Borders, and wrote an extremely classy blog entry about it.

14/52: Juanitta Baldwin and Ester Grubb's Unsolved Disappearances in the Great Smoky Mountains was interesting, but really needed an editor. There were sentences without punctuation and paragraphs with no structure, but the stories themselves were intriguing. One of the people even disappeared from a trail that I've been on!

15/52: Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust was bleak, the first one more than the second. They're both very well written, but it's hard to say I liked them. Mostly I just felt depressed and crushed beneath the ugliness of human nature.

16/52: H.G. Wells' The Time Machine was free from the Kindle store, and it has been several years since I read it, so I downloaded it with my free Kindle app for the iPad. It's still good, and is now the first e-book I've ever read.

17/52: Pearl S. Buck's Death in the Castle was really tense, although it started a little slow. It's the story of two broke English aristocrats who agree to sell their castle to an American, but when the American gets there he explains that he's moving the castle to America. The Brits are angry, the castle is haunted, the American is in love with the maid, there might be hidden treasure behind one of the secret doors, and then there's the murdering. I guess I didn't expect a modern thriller from a Nobel prize winner.

18/52: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go started out a little confusing, then turned sad as you realized what was really going on in the book, and then it should have been bleak and hopeless but instead it still managed to be touching and heartbreaking instead.

19/52: Tad Williams' Caliban's Hour retells The Tempest from Caliban's point of view, opening twenty years later when Caliban has made his way to Milan, intent on revenge against Prospero and Miranda. Prospero has died, but Miranda, now a matron, is helplessly forced to listen all night as Caliban shares his tale and counts down the minutes before he kills her. I never really liked "The Tempest", but I really enjoyed this book.

20/52: Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book was beautiful and wonderful and when I got to the end I cried and cried and cried and that burned my eyes a little. It's the story of a little endangered orphan boy, and how a graveyard full of ghosts adopts him and raises him as their own while trying to keep him safe.

21/52: I bought Steven Paul Davies' Out at the Movies to donate to the resource center because we don't have a lot of pop-cultural books, but then I decided to read it first. It's definitely, as it said, a history of "gay" cinema, because it more or less ignores lesbian movies. A few are mentioned, but it focuses on films about men. It goes decade by decade, but includes a lot of plot summaries and not as much discussion of cinema as a craft. The author also spends pages praising "Brokeback Mountain", which he pretty much considers the pinnacle of gay film, so I took the whole book with a grain of salt.

22/52: Jennifer Egan's The Keep was really engaging. It tells the story of two cousins who reunite after a horrible prank gone wrong in their teenage years at a castle in Europe, but the story is actually told by a narrator in prison who isn't either cousin. Once the cousins actually reunite, things go off the rails rather quickly and keep getting worse, while at the same time things in prison start a downward spiral and then all of a sudden both stories slam together and it turns out to be a really good read with surprising depth at the end.

23/52: I didn't like Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates as much as I did Assassination Vacation. It was interesting, but slower moving.

24/52: I can't believe I didn't read Roger Manley's Weird Tennessee before now, but then I realized it hasn't been out that long. I've had the one for New York for years, but I guess it takes a while to work your way through all the states. There are a lot of things here that I haven't seen before, but I was kind of excited to see how many of them I have been to. I feel almost like a native.

25/52: Ramsey Campbell's Obsession tells the story of four teenage friends who receive a mysterious letter promising to grant what they most need. Of course, when they get it, it turns out to be one of those horrible "Monkey's Paw" type wishes, and ruins their lives. Even worse, when they all grow up, the price of the wishes comes due, and it's twice as bad as the wishes were. I found this to be ok at first, but I got a little bored in the last hundred pages and just kind of slogged through.

26/52: Joe Hill's Horns tells a story of revenge where the Devil is the good guy. Ig Perrish has spent a year in hell, suspected of murdering his girlfriend by everyone who knows him. Outcast and shunned, he wakes up one morning with horns growing out of his temples, and discovers that they can make people tell him things and can make people do things, terrible things that maybe aren't so terrible after all.

27/52: I love F. Scott Fitzgerald, but by the time I finished The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories I kind of felt like I'd had just enough of F. Scott for a little while. I really enjoyed "Bernice Bobs Her Hair", "The Offshore Pirate", rereading "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz", and the title story, but a few of the others were a little heavy and sanctimonious. They seemed almost out of character.

28/52: Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to Less Than Zero, sure was a Bret Easton Ellis book: morally ambiguous characters with no sense of direction, a vague plot, gratuitous sex and violence, drugs, and a vaguely empty feeling when you finish it like you're not sure you even read a book at all. It's the literary equivalent to a breeze blowing past a restaurant: it smells good for a second, but isn't really nourishing.

29/52: I suddenly felt like rereading Stephen King's Carrie again. I still like it, but am still annoyed that he forgot who the character of Stella Horan was between the beginning of the story and the end of the story, and the editor never caught it. Stella is Carrie's teenaged neighbor when Carrie is three years old, but later in the book she's one of Carrie's high school classmates. This has irked me since the first time I read the book.

30/52: John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let Me In, also known as "Let the Right One In" was creepy and disturbing and so good. Every time I thought it had reached a threshhold of disturbingness, something new and horrible popped up on top of that. Adding in that it was also pretty suspenseful, it made for a really good read.

31/52: David Sinclair's The Land That Never Was tells the story of Sir Gregor MacGregor, a con man in the 1800's who convinced hundreds, possibly thousands, of people to invest in the South American country of Poyais. He had an embassy, bonds, commissions for the army, ships ready to go, books and reports about the country and the GDP, and hundreds of Scottish colonists who left on ships to start the colonization. Then they got to South America and found out that there was no country of Poyais, and hundreds of them died before the rest got back to England and sued. Then MacGregor moved to France, and did the whole thing again. It would be funny, if not so sad.

32/52: When I saw Fred Rosen's Lobster Boy at the used bookstore, I thought, "That looks like something my friend Kim would read!" and it turned out to be morbid and fascinating. I liked it a lot.

33/52: Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was good, but also depressing. It tells the story of a poor woman, Henrietta Lacks, who went to Johns Hopkins for charity medical care and had samples of a cervical tumor taken without her consent or knowledge. She died, but the tumor cells lived on as the HeLa line, one of the first human cell lines to survive and grow in a laboratory. The HeLa cells eventually spawned billion dollar industries, helped cure polio, and led to countless medical advances, but Henrietta's descendants are too poor to afford medical care or schooling, and the world has never known who the woman behind the cells was, how she lived, or what she left behind.

The worst part was an interview with this lady scientist who helped take her children's blood under somewhat false pretenses, so that they could figure out the HeLa DNA and use it to know if cell cultures in their labs had been contaminated. The children thought it was part of a cancer screening, to make sure they didn't have what their mother died from, and no one told them different because they were afraid that the children wouldn't donate the blood otherwise.

The scientist lady is like, "It's terrible. I feel really bad for their whole family. If you talk to them, could you tell them I said so, and then tell them that I'd really like more blood if they ever feel like giving any?"

34/52: Michael Chabon's The Final Solution tells the WWII-era story of an old, retired, once-famous British detective who is called in by the local village police to investigate a murdered boarder at the rooming house and the missing parrot of a young, mute, German refugee staying there. The bird speaks only six-digit strings of German numbers, the meaning of which is the focus of the second mystery in the novel, and while the detective never grasps what they mean the reader, who has the historical perspective of the end of the war, comes to a sad and heartbreaking realization at the end.

35/52: George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London was a semi-autobiographic tour of Paris and London for a few years as a member of the working poor. I learned that when you are poor, there are a lot of bugs everywhere.

36/52: Stephen Baxter's Ark was the excellent sequel to a book of his I read last year or the year before, Flood, and picks up right where that book left off. It's hard to say this is a good book, because it doesn't really stand alone without the other book, but together, they make an entertaining story.

37/52: John N. Nance's Orbit tells the story of Kip Dawson, a man who wins a trip on a commercial spaceflight. On the way up, a freak accident kills the pilot and knocks out the radio, leaving him stranded in orbit alone with no hope of rescue. Finding a laptop in the cabin, he starts writing a long message to his family, telling the story of his life, unaware that the laptop is sending and that the whole world ends up reading as he counts down the five days until his air runs out. The last half of the book, while a little hard to believe, was very tense, and I stayed up kind of late to finish it.

38/52: Every couple of years I suddenly feel like I want to read Margaret Atwood, so at some point I added The Blind Assassin to my reading pile, and now I picked it up and remembered that every couple years when I read a Margaret Atwood book it turns out to be long and kind of slow and I get bored.

39/52: I bought James Patterson (and, in tiny print, Gabrielle Charbonnet)'s Witch and Wizard because it was pretty much the nearest paperback to my hand when we were on a quick store run between work stuff, and it was on a lot of bestseller lists a while ago. It tells the story of a parallel earth USA, where a totalitarian government takes over and begins imprisoning everyone who is different because all of those people actually have magical powers. Whit and Wisteria Allgood are, according to prophecy, the most magical of all and the book tells the story of their imprisonment and escape in their own words. I had a problem with the narrative voice being exactly the same even though the narrator switches back and forth between the two, and also thought that Wisty spent way too much time describing her muscular brother's fantastic abs. I see that there is at least one sequel, but was pretty bored by this and won't be picking it up.

40/52: Chuck Palahniuk's Tell All was entertaining, but such a short, fast read that it turns out that I spent more time waiting to go into Borders to buy it than I did reading the book itself. It tells the story of veteran actress Kathie Kenton, an Old Hollywood survivor of an Elizabeth Taylor-esque personal life and film career, through the eyes of Hazie Coogan, her Thelma Ritter-style employee and companion. As Kathie's career winds down, she is seduced by a handsome young man, and Kathie and Hazie discover that he's already written a tell-all of his love for Kathie, complete with her tragic death. As they work to thwart his efforts, told in constantly revised final tragic chapters, the story descends into a hilarious string of bear attacks, bathtub terror, yakuza assassins, and the utter, final horror of being outlived by Lillian Hellman.

41/52: Mary Higgins Clark's Let Me Call You Sweetheart continues her reign as the Queen of Suspense. This one is about a lady lawyer who starts poking into an old case and suddenly she has to find the real killer and he's menacing her daughter and it might be her ex-husband or it might be her mentor or it might be a mobster or it might be a homosexual jewel thief or it might be a plastic surgeon! And she might fall in love by the end of the book! I mean, really? Does it matter what the specific plot is? You kind of already know what you're getting with one of these.

42/52: Judith O'Brien's Mary Jane retells the origin story of Spider-Man from Mary Jane, the old friend turned girlfriend's point of view. It's an interesting take on a familiar story, but also wanders off into teen girl issues like gossipy friends and getting anorexia because you're too fat to be on the cheerleading team. The weird part, though, is that each chapter has a little pencil drawing of the characters on the opposite page and Harry Osbourne (played by James Franco in the movies), is totally drawn like Kellan Lutz. Not just a little bit, but Kellan Lutz's actual face drawn onto some other body. I have no idea how the illustrator managed to confuse the two.

43/52: Sam Staggs' Close-Up On Sunset Boulevard was entertaining, and made me watch the movie three times while reading the book, but I have the same complaint here that I did when I read his "All About Eve" book (which someone borrowed from me and never returned): when he gets to the part where he talks about references and homages to the movie in other movies, he seems to be really stretching in some places. Just because William Holden wore a bathrobe in another movie, too, doesn't mean that the movie was referencing this one. Sometimes guys are just naked and wet and put on a bathrobe.

44/52: Even though my friend Sara said it was good, I wasnt sure that I would like Megan Abbott's The End of Everything because I really like her noir, period stuff and this was a more modern-era novel. It turns out that Sara was right, though, and I did like it. A lot.

45/52: I enjoyed Chris Kimball's Fannie's Last Supper, in which the author and a team of chefs set out to cook a 12 course meal from Fannie Farmer's Original 1896 Boston Cooking School Cookbook using authentic ingredients and techniques, and I really enjoyed all of the historical background on Fannie Farmer and the evolution of cooking, kitchens, and dining in general, but I also couldn't shake the thought that this really was a rich people's adventure. I know that the higher levels of gastronomy and fine dining have always been reserved for the rich, but he spends two years renovating a Victorian cookstove, buying sterling silver punchbowls, and testing and retesting recipes. While it's kind of fascinatingly repulsive to hear about learning to clean and dress a calf's head, buying 110 year old gold-rimmed glassware to serve sorbet in is an adventure beyond most people's means.

46/52: Edward Lee's The Black Train was supposed to be a scary story about Civil War ghosts in Tennessee, but it wasn't especially scary. It was a little gross, and there was a lot of sex: gay, straight, water sports, incest, ghost sex, bestiality, etc. but it felt kind of like the gross-out moments and the sex were just distractions from how thin the rest of the story was.

47/52: Michael Chabon's A Model World is a collection of short stories, broken into two parts. In the first part, all of the stories seem broken, as if some piece of them is missing. They all involve romance of some sort, but they all read like Chabon has no real idea of how to relate to women or understand them. I don't mean in the "he's secretly gay" sense, but more in the sense that he just seems disconnected and his characters relate to women as if they are a completely foreign species. Part of it might also be that all of the stories are told by male narrators, so the men don't understand the women but the women only act, without ever feeling or explaining themselves. The stories in the second part are all about the same characters at different points in their lives, and while they suffer the same flaws as the first half, they hang together as a whole, as if this was part of a novel that fizzled out.

48/52: I picked up Benjamin Nugent's American Nerd because it was marketed as a quirky, funny, memoir type exploration of what it means to be a nerd in America. Instead it was like a real sociological study, and not really fun at all.

49/52: Erin Kelly's The Poison Tree tells the story of how Karen, a straight A good girl student, spends a summer living with free-spirited Biba and her brother, Rex, in their crumbling family home in London. Ten years later, Karen is picking Rex up outside of prison after he finishes serving for double murder, and she has a ten year old child in the back seat. The story alternates between the past and the present and gets really, really tense, especially when you think you kind of know what happened and it turns out that it isn't what happened at all.

50/52: Les Daniels' Wonder Woman: The Complete Historytells the complete history of the character in the media, from her invention by Dr. William Moulton Marston (who also invented the polygraph machine and lived with both his wife and his mistress in one house for his entire adult life with their shared children) through the TV series and into the present day. It includes a lot of rare photos and artwork from old issues.

51/52: I liked Michael Chabon's short story collection Werewolves in Their Youth much more than I liked "A Model World", because the stories here seemed more complete.

52/52: Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves is long and slow, and you figure out the allegedly shocking plot twist well in advance due to the title of the book, which seems like kind of a poor choice. Anyway, it's the story of five different love stories and one story of theft and blackmail told via the intersection of a story of vandalism, therapy, and obsession.

53/52: Rebecca Coleman's The Kingdom of Childhood (not to be confused with the teaching manual of the same name) tells the story of Judy, a kindergarten teacher, and Zach, the 16 year old classmate of her son that she starts having an affair with. At first, her affair seems kind of bizarre and motivationless, but then the story starts flashing back to her childhood and how she got to be this way, and the whole thing takes a really dark, scary turn really fast. It was good, but not at all the story I thought I was getting.

54/52: Thomas Tryon's Lady was a slow, sometimes aimless coming of age story about a boy and his rich neighbor, who supports their family but has a terrible secret. In the end, the secret isn't really all that terrible, and while the novel is sometimes touching it oftentimes doesn't seem to really be going anywhere.

55/52: I have to admit that I read Augusten Burroughs' A Wolf at the Table with a high degree of skepticism. After Running With Scissors the family sued and then settled out of court on the grounds that he had exaggerated and that it was not a factually accurate memoir, so part of me questions why Burroughs waited until his father was dead to write a book portraying him as an abusive alcoholic psychopath who terrorizes the family and murders guinea pigs. It's easy to portray a man as a complete monster when he can't defend himself.

56/52: Remember when my friend sent me Todd Gregory's Every Frat Boy Wants It, and it was hilariously awful? Well, my gay book club was advertising the brand new sequel, and it was somehow even worse! Games Frat Boys Play tells the story of Jordy, the Mary Sue-est Mary Sue who ever Mary Sued through a work of fiction. He's a dumpy genius with a 100 million dollar trust fund who speaks four languages and spent his whole life at Swiss boarding school, then decides to go to college and join a frat because he wants friends, to fit in, and to love a boy. Initially rejected by Chad and dissed by Chad's hot minions (think Regina George and the Plastics, but as gay boys instead of drag queens), he is invited to join the fraternity after they spot his Tag Heuer watch and realize that he's secretly rich. Chad still doesn't want him, so Jordy spends Christmas break working out a lot and becoming super buff, then uses his mad computer hacking skillz, huge trust fund, and genius brain to exact his revenge while also banging his way through an endless stream of gay clubgoers, personal trainers, and drunken straight guys who all find him irresistable now that he's hot.

57/52: Black Swan Rising says it's by Lee Carroll, but it's not! Lee Carroll is actually the pen name that Carol Goodman and her husband Lee Slonimsky used to write this fantasy novel together. It tells the story of Garet James, a jewelry designer who wanders into a strange shop and is offered a thousand dollars to open a silver box. Once she does, all sorts of things are unleashed, she finds out she has a magical destiny, and she has to work with fairies and vampires and dragons to stop an ancient evil from destroying Manhattan. It's a departure from Goodman's usual stuff, but it's a pretty good read.

58/52: Rereading The Secret History is like visiting a place that you love, and having the trip actually go well. I should write about this book someday.

59/52: Chuck Palahniuk's Pygmy, which tells the story of a foreign terrorist operative implanted in the US under the guise of a high school exchange student, is clearly supposed to be a satire on the consumerist, falsely religious culture so common in America, but everything Palahniuk has to say here feels like it's been said before, and the story itself ultimately falls flat.

60/52: I really enjoyed Tobias Wolff's Old School, which tells the story of a boys' prep school where every quarter the students compete for an audience with a visiting writer, and how the competition slowly destroys all of their friendships. Ayn Rand is pretty savaged by Wolff, but from what I've read her depiction was pretty accurate.

61/52: Mary Higgins Clark's Just Take My Heart tells the story of a courageous widowed district attorney prosecuting a man accused of killing his famous actress wife while also in the sights of a notorious serial killer. She finds herself behaving oddly, and filled with strange feelings toward the defendant, and maybe it's because she had a heart transplant on the same day that the famous actress was killed and the actress was an organ donor and donated her heart to a young widow, because this is entirely mathematically possible, right?

62/52: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Cemetary Dance was a diverting story of murder and police and animal sacrifice and the FBI and voodoo and zombies.

63/52: I read Frank Gray's Scoremanship and wrote a blog entry about it. Now I know how to score with any chick, anywhere, just in case I ever want to.

64/52: Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour was interesting, but I like Bourdain a lot more when he is being honest and funny. Too often in this book he seems kind of almost lecturing, like when he's talking about the American war in Vietnam and how awful it was and how we all have moral responsibility for it or how vegetarians need to stop lecturing from the comfort of their own homes when poor people in Cambodia have to eat chicken or die. I'd find his moral posturing more convincing if he wasn't delivering it while discussing the fact that someone payed him to fly around the world, eat, and write a book about it.

65/52: Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu is a collection of short stories set in the universe of her other book, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. It was entertaining, but mostly reminded me that she hasn't written another book since, and that I really liked that first one.

66/52: Christopher Pike's Falling was another of his attempts to write an "adult" book instead of those teenage horror thrillers that I read all of in junior high. This one was an FBI thriller about serial killers and kidnapping and gritty FBI agents with dark pasts, but remember when Jesse from "Saved By the Bell" decided to go straight to "Showgirls" and it was all nipples and seizures in the pool and fuck fuck fuckity fuck with the swearing and the "Look! Look how grown up I am!" and it was awful? This book was kind of like that, in that all the FBI agents were constantly talking about cock and pussy and blowjobs and "look at the huge cock on that suspect" (someone in the book actually says that), and it was also kind of awful, especially the agent who broke all the rules to find justice but somehow didn't get fired. TWICE.

67/52: I found Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker in the free book bin at McKay's (oddly, they gave me store credit when I brought it back; I guess the demand changed or something), and decided to pick it up because it was about the financial industry and I had a vague idea that if I read it I would understand more about my friend Keri's job. It turned out to be kind of interesting and pretty entertaining for a layperson, and now I understand Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac better, and bailouts, and buyouts, and junk bonds, and how awful it must be to be a woman in the financial industry, at least in the 1980's.

68/52: I reread Dominick Dunne's The Two Mrs. Grenvilles and enjoyed it. It makes me want to reread some of his other books, since it's been a while since I picked up most of them and I've always found them kind of breezy and comfortable.

69/52: Rick Riordan's The Titan's Curse is the third book in the Percy Jackson series, and follows the kids on yet another impossible quest with yet another impossible deadline. I enjoyed the book, but it felt pretty similar to the one before it.

70/52: Rock Riordan's Battle of the Labyrinth, the 4th book in the Percy Jackson series, makes me kind of wonder if Percy Jackson might be a little dumb. In book chronology, he's known that he's a demigod and that other gods, demigods, and monsters might try to kill him for about three or 4 years, I think, but in all that time he doesn't seem to have done any reading or research to figure out anything about all these other gods. Instead, every time it's like, "Who's Typhon? Who's Janus? What's the Labyrinth?" I think I learned more about mythology reading Wonder Woman comics than this kid has actually being part of the myths. I did like the twists in the story, though.

71/52: I stayed up late at night and got up early in the morning to finish The Last Olympian, the final book in the Percy Jackson series. It's pretty much a book length battle, mostly across the streets and parks of Manhattan, as Percy and his friends make a final stand for Olympus against Kronos, lord of the Titans, and it ties up the series really well.

72/52: I reread Martha Sherrill's My Last Movie Star and then sort of wrote about it.

73/52: Mark Mills' The Savage Garden is a mystery that turns out to be a double mystery. Adam, a student from Cambridge, comes to a villa in Tuscany to study and write about a famous garden. As he works it becomes clear that the symbolism in the garden points toward a story of adultery and murder, but at the same time the mysteriously sealed third floor of the villa seems to point to another, much more recent murder. As the danger around Adam grows, it becomes clear that someone is manipulating him into discovering the truth, but who and why? I really enjoyed this, although it was a little slow at the beginning.

74/52: My friend Kim sent me Richard Benson's F in Exams, a collection of real, hilariously bad answers to test questions, and it made me laugh and laugh.

75/52: Back when the movie Notes on a Scandal came out there was a lot of discussion about how it made the teacher too sympathetic, and downplayed that she was a child molestor. I remember reading a lot of articles that talked about the differences in the way society perceives a female student sleeping with a male teacher and a male student sleeping with a female teacher, and even reading something in a men's magazine that talked about how the fathers don't know what to say, because really they're so proud of their sons for nailing a hot older babe and society won't let them say it. (Classy, I know, but a lot of men's magazines are like that. See articles like this one about studies showing that men's magazines and convicted rapists using the same language to describe women.) In Boy Toy, Barry Lyga definitely presents the opposing view, and reminds us that these kids are victims, not studs. It's the story of Josh Mendel and how five years ago his affair with his history teacher completely destroyed his life. He's angry, can't talk to or touch girls, is anti-social, and now when he's about to graduate high school his former teacher is getting out on parole, his baseball team has the biggest game of the season coming up, and he has to decide where to go to college while all of the old memories come flooding back. It's a good book, but sometimes painful to read.

76/52: I'm With the Bears: Stories From a Damaged Planet, edited by Mark Martin, was a fast but depressing read. The stories are well written and interesting, but it gets a little sad reading endless drought, famine, deforestation, starvation, fighting, etc.

So, yeah, that's a pretty long year of reading and, as always, doesn't include cookbooks and comics. For 2012, I'm just going to resolve to read 52 books again, and see what happens.

The Soda Pop Diaries

2011-12-30T16:08:00.002-05:00

A few years ago a friend with an exercise physiology degree tried to tell me that diet soda was bad for me.

"It slows down your metabolism! It's all full of chemicals! It's so bad for you! You might as well just drink regular soda, because it'll kill you just as fast!"

I thought about this, but I had another friend who constantly forwarded me and our other friends a link like this one that listed all the horrible things that happen to you when you drink a non-diet soda.

"Your body has three seconds of bliss, followed by an hour of insulin spikes and sugar crash and all your nutrients leeching out of your body and then you might die!"

Overwhelmed by the idea that neither could be the right choice and unwilling to accept that just not drinking soda at all could be a viable choice, I kept drinking diet soda and pretended it was good for me because it wasn't causing liver shutdown and insulin spikes. Lately, though, I've been thinking about my diet soda consumption.

There's a lady in the office who saves soda caps for something at her son's school. Since I rarely drink soda in bottles at work (I get it at lunch from the dining places, where it almost always comes in cups), I save my caps at home and then bring them to her, and I noticed in November that my pile of caps was kind of huge after only a few weeks. Curious and intrigued, especially with the new year and the need to make some life changes on the horizon (I haven't forgotten that girl on crutches who passed me at the Race for the Cure), I decided to track my soda consumption for a month, just to see how much I was drinking.

Jeannie raised the point that just by being conscious of the fact that I was tracking, I might unconsciously limit myself, which is a valid point. I tried really hard to just drink as much as I regularly do, and if I ate out, I tried to give an honest guess at how big the cups were based on my cups at home, which I actually measured. I also had to make sure that I didn't top off any partially emptied cups, but always finished one before drinking the next. If I had soda at work I wrote it down on a post it note, so that I didn't forget about it by the time I got home, and then I wrote it in my log:

So, how much soda am I drinking in a month?

A lot.

12/1: 32 oz Diet Coke, 24 oz diet grape
12/2: 26 oz diet Mountain Dew, 24 oz diet grape
12/3: 60 oz diet orange
12/4: 4 oz diet orange, 36 oz diet Mountain Dew
12/5: 24 oz diet Mountain Dew
12/6: 36 oz diet Mountain Dew
12/7: 40 oz Diet Coke
12/8: 20 oz Sun Drop, 24 oz Diet Dr. Pepper, 18 oz diet Mountain Dew
12/9: 40 oz Diet Dr. Pepper
12/10: 48 oz diet black cherry, 10 oz of punch with Sprite in it
12/11: 24 oz diet black cherry, 12 oz diet grape
12/12: 20 oz Diet Dr. Pepper, 24 oz diet grape
12/13: 12 oz diet grape, 64 oz Diet Coke, 12 oz diet black cherry
12/14: 20 oz Diet Dr. Pepper, 24 oz diet black cherry
12/15: 20 oz Mello Yellow Zero, 12 oz diet black cherry
12/16: 12 oz diet black cherry, 36 oz diet root beer
12/17: 24 oz diet root beer, 12 oz diet orange
12/18: 48 oz diet orange, 12 oz diet drop red
12/19: 20 oz Diet Pepsi
12/20: 64 oz Diet Coke
12/21: 36 oz Diet Coke, 12 oz diet drop red
12/22: 32 oz Diet Coke, 12 oz diet drop red
12/23: 24 oz diet drop red
12/24: 48 oz diet black cherry
12/25: 12 oz diet black cherry, 12 oz diet Mountain Dew
12/26: 24 oz diet Mountain Dew
12/27: 12 oz diet Mountain Dew, 36 oz diet ginger ale
12/28: 24 oz diet ginger ale
12/29: 48 oz diet 7 Up
12/30: 12 oz diet 7 Up, 36 oz diet Mountain Dew

1318 ounces of soda.

That's about 10 and a third gallons of soda. Just to conceptualize that, it's a third of a barrel. An average sized fish tank. The size of the cooler of Gatorade that they dump on football coaches, except instead of pouring it onto a person I poured it into my mouth. According to US News and World Report the average American drinks a gallon of soda a week, and I'm a little over twice that. I'm not sure if it's bad for me, since it's almost entirely diet soda, but I'm pretty sure that it can't possibly be good, so I'm giving up soda for 2012.

I'm probably going to be really sleepy for a while, because I'm not a regular coffee drinker. I'm probably also going to be cranky. This is your warning, people around me.

I'm going to go finish the bottle of diet Mountain Dew in the fridge now.

The Night Before Christmas

2011-12-24T21:15:00.002-05:00

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through my house, something was stirring. Me, stirring up a pot of sugar, evaporated milk, and butter, because I decided to try making the Carnation Famous Fudge Kit again.

You may remember that last year I ran into a bit of trouble with the kit, and instead of creamy glossy candy-shop fudge I ended up with fudge that I described as "an old pioneer woman's face".

What kind of fudge is that? Rocky road?

It's more of a, uh, Ma Joad, actually...

This year, though, I decided that it would be different. I thought through the instructions and the way I had cooked the fudge last year, and came up with two changes:

The first is

Last year when I made it, I used margarine, and even though people say it's the same I know that it's not because chefs are saying on TV all the time that "If it calls for butter, you should just use butter". I had a little bit of butter left over in the fridge from last time I made delicious scones, so I figured I might as well use the real thing and see if that made a difference.

The other change was pre-opening the chips and marshmallows before it was time to use them:

The instructions say that as soon as you remove the sugar/milk/butter mixture from the heat, you immediately stir in the marshmallows and chocolate chips. Last year I pulled the mixture off the heat, opened the marshmallows and poured them in, then opened the chocolate chips and poured them in, and then began stirring. Is it possible that those precious seconds make the difference between smooth, glossy fudge and grainy, unattractive fudge? I'm not sure, but I was willing to try.

Unfortunately, it came out better, but still not perfect:

Swirls? Yes.

Creamy texture? Yes and no:

The inside is perfect, but the top is still slightly grainy.

Next year, I'll try boiling the sugar/milk/butter mix at a slightly lower temperature, as I now think that it's so hot that it's crystallizing some of the chocolate sugars when I add the chips.

Either that, or I'm just bad at making fudge.

Ferro Lad, Invisible Kid, and the True Meaning of Christmas

2011-12-22T21:12:00.007-05:00

...Superboy comes flying into the future to visit Legion Headquarters for the holiday:

Our headquarters was under reconstruction at the time because Omega, a giant monster that Brainiac 5 created one of the times that he was insane, destroyed it. We couldn't use the Miracle Machine to rebuild in under a minute like the last time that happened, because Matter Eater Lad had to eat the Miracle Machine to defeat Omega and the other Omega that Brainiac 5 created when the first one wasn't crazy and destructive enough by itself.

That's a story for another day, though, and shouldn't be confused with the time Brainiac 5 went crazy and built a Supergirl love-robot in his sleep, or the time he went crazy and framed Ultra Boy for murder, or the time he almost went crazy because he thought Sensor Girl was Supergirl in disguise.

Anyway, Superboy is wandering around the new headquarters when Saturn Girl and Phantom Girl decide to use the mission monitor board to show him how we celebrate Christmas in the future:

And also how we celebrate other holidays, or don't celebrate at all:

Rather than check in on the rest of the team or ask how Christianity managed to spread through the entire galaxy in only a thousand years, Superboy instead gets a wild impulse, and forces the rest of the team to play along:

Forget anything I said about Brainiac 5, because that, right there, is the face of insanity.

The team hops in the cruiser, abandoning the mission monitor board because, I guess, emergencies and crime take the night off for Christmas, and zips through space to where they think the Star of Bethlehem was. Instead of the star, though, they find a planet, and it's in trouble:

I have no idea why it'll take the evacuation arks so long to get there. The Legion cruiser took all of about ten minutes. Anyway

Anyway nothing!

Ferro Lad, how many eggnogs have you had already? I'm trying to finish the story.

Nobody wants to hear that crap. That story isn't fun or exciting. It's just weird. Really weird.

Look, people. The Legion works with the three races on Planet Doomed and convinces them to work together to keep each other alive until the arks can get there. The end. Merry Christmas.

You just ruined the story.

You ruined Christmas, Ferro Lad.

The hell I did! Go have a rumnog and adjust your headband, Kid. I have a story of heroism and explosions, and that's what Christmas is really all about.

Since when?

Since "Die Hard", Kid. Since "Die Hard". Now, like I said, pour yourself a rumnog, have a seat, and I'll tell you all about:

As you can see from the intro, it's already a thousand times better than that other story, because I'm in this one.

You can also see that Superboy tucks his pajama shirt tightly into his pajama pants for some reason. Don't know what the hell that's all about.

Our story opens with Superboy getting ready to help knock down the old Smallville Armory:

But holy crap! The armory is already getting knocked down:

Who could it be? Who could perform this amazing feat before Superboy could manage to lift a finger? It would have to be someone brave, and strong, and maybe even capable of sucker punching Superboy to save the galaxy from the Sun Eater.

Yeah, baby.

I fly away while Supes is picking up his jaw, but he barely has time to think about following me before this guy pops up to save a parachuter:

Invisible Kid. He never saved the galaxy from the Sun Eater or anything, but he's good people.

Wow. You really know how to lay on the compliments. Really. I'm glad I came back from the dead for this.

Sounds to me like someone needs another drink.

So, later that night Superboy is in his basement, making a tape recording of his diary, and we decide to bust in on him:

and prove we're real:

Thanks for keeping the x-rays above the waist, Supes. I might want to have some Ferro kids someday.

After we show him our flesh (and damn, do I look ripped in that panel or what? My abs are like an anatomy lesson in AWESOME) we make up some excuse about why we're there:

Which is clearly a lie because there ain't never been a day when I wasn't ready for a fight. The Kid and I explain this:

And help Supes beat the hell out of a giant robot. After that, he decides we don't suck:

And then we head home...

...TO TRAGEDY!

Not only are we dead, again, but it gets so much worse:

Not only were we exploding clones duped by our friends before we got splattered all over Weisinger Plaza in front of the headquarters, but our friend Superboy was in on it the whole time:

Take your giant robot and shove it, Superboy.

I'm sorry, but how was this story a better Christmas story than the one I was telling? The one that actually had Christmas in it?

I don't know. I'm full of rum, eggnog, and ragey mood swings.

Happy Holidays?

Whatever.

Go make me another rumnog before we explode again.

My Last Movie Star

2011-12-18T08:56:00.003-05:00

Toward the end of every year there are at least a few times when I give my bookshelves a casual looking over, to decide if everything on them needs to stay or if it's time to send them to McKay's for credit, so that I can get more books. Am I ever going to read that book again? Do I still like that author? Why did I think I wanted to save that in the first place?

I ended up doing that perusal the other day, when I finished a book and was deciding if I wanted to read something new off of my "To Be Read" piles or to reread something old that I still enjoy but haven't looked at in a while. I was in front of the Ri-Z bookshelf, pulling out The Radioactive Boyscout for the McKay's stack (I remember enjoying it, but I've never felt like rereading it or referencing it for anything so it's just taking up shelfspace that something I like more could use), when I noticed Martha Sherrill's My Last Movie Star and thought, "I don't really remember if I liked that. Maybe it can go? I vaguely remember the plot, though, and it sounds like something that I'd like. Why did I save this?"

And then I remembered: That book comes with a story.

When I still worked Albany we were very close to Saratoga, and once or twice a season a group of us would go over for a day at the races. We usually brought lawnchairs or folding camp chairs or blankets, bags of snacks, and paid for lawn seats, and I don't think any of us ever bet more than five or ten dollars per race. At the end of ten races that can still come out to fifty to a hundred dollars, but it was once or twice a season, not like we were dropping a hundred dollars on the ponies every weekend, and I usually came out ahead or broke even, anyway.

One year, several groups of people from our department happened to all have picked the same day, and met up in the lawn seats. The director of the judicial office had come very early and claimed a picnic table, and the fifteen or twenty of us who ran into him and his family (his wife and daughter also worked for our department) set up around it and had a pretty fun, relaxing day. It went so well, in fact, that people were still talking about it all through professional staff training, so the next year the professional staff training committee tried to recreate it, and I ended up in charge.

My boss was actually in charge of professional staff training that year, and I wasn't even on the committee, but she had some sort of commitment that weekend, and asked if I would coordinate that particular social event. I was happy to, as I wanted to go to the races anyway and we had a new coworker that year who was cute, gay, and out, and since I was younger, thinner, wore contacts, and had hair then, cute gay guys sometimes also thought I was cute and I was hoping that he would attend and we would get to spend some time chatting and hanging out in a totally innocent friendly group of coworkers setting. We set up a meeting time, and ten people RSVPed, including the cute new guy.

On Saturday morning, I was all ready by the car at the meetup spot. I was wearing a summery short sleeved white, baby blue, and taupe buttondown that I'd gotten at the Hard Rock Cafe in Boston. I don't normally buy a lot of Hard Rock Cafe gear, but it was on clearance and I remember thinking that it was a good bar shirt. It really has nothing to do with this story, except that I remember I was wearing it because it matched my buck suede oxfords and I was pretty in love with those shoes for a while. (Now I wear the same shoes to work almost every day. My old coworkers would probably be shocked, as I used to have about twenty pairs of shoes in steady rotation when I worked there.) Anyway, I was all set up at the meetup spot to leave campus and it was time to go, and nobody else was there.

I like to pretend that I waited five or ten minutes before calling people, but I have no patience so I probably only waited a minute, if not thirty seconds. People were too hung over to go, which was understandable since our campus culture was pretty alcohol heavy and it was a Saturday morning before classes had started but after summer classes were over. Cute guy was also hung over, (by the end of professional staff training I had gotten to know him better and realized that he was only cute on the outside, especially after he made it clear that I did not have good enough abs to ever be more than a friend; yes, he actually did say that) but at least he was answering his phone. A couple of people didn't answer at all, and a couple of people had decided to do something else and just didn't feel like going to the races anymore. Since I'd already gotten up, and I really wanted to go to the races, I decided to just go by myself.

When I got there I bought a lemonade and realized that I had no one to talk to, so I walked around and looked at the vendor tables while I waited for the races to start. One of the tables had books, the kind of recently released hardcovers that you see in the bargain section of Barnes and Noble after the paperback version has come out, but they only had about fifteen different titles, and out of those I selected "My Last Movie Star" because it looked interesting.

The book tells the story of Clementine James, a Hollywood reporter and celebrity profiler who has gotten tired of Hollywood and celebrities. On the verge of retirement her editor convinces her to do one last piece, a magazine exclusive with up and coming new Hollywood "It Girl" Allegra Coleman. Their few days together stretches into a roadtrip up the California coast until a car accident abruptly terminates it, leaving Clementine in the hospital and Allegra missing. While Clementine waits for news, she is visited by a string of deceased former "It Girls" and Hollywood starlets: Myrna Loy, Gloria Swanson, Natalie Wood, Tallulah Bankhead, and others from the Silent Era all the way up to the fall of the studio system, and they all want to share their stories of Hollywood and the price of fame.

I started reading it at the races, using my receipt for a bookmark, but by the fifth race of the day I was bored. Since I was still ahead for the day on winnings, I decided to leave, which is also right about the time that the sky decided to cloud up. By the time I got back to the car, I was walking in a sheeting downpour with no umbrella, and I drove home soaking wet but somehow managed to keep that book dry. It was the only time I ever went to the races alone, and may be the last time I ever went at all although I can't remember for certain.

That story's not that exciting. It's long and pointless and doesn't really go anywhere, but it's a specific memory of a certain time and a certain way that I lived then, and it's been enough every year to save that book from the shelf-purge when my eye happens across it. This year, since I had just finished another book and hadn't started a new one, I decided to reread it and see if maybe the story in the book was actually better than the story about the book.

It turns out that it was, and My Last Movie Star has been safely returned to the shelf until I reread it again someday.

Are You Willing to Die for That Food Processor?: Part 2 of My Trip Home

2011-12-08T18:33:00.002-05:00

Reading the first entry about my trip over, I realized that I sound really pissy and cranky, and I'm not sure why. I really had a nice time reading on planes, reading in the car, reading on the couch, watching my mom almost get in a brawl over a food processor at Wal-Mart on Black Friday, and almost ending up on the "No Fly" list for raising my voice to a TSA Officer.

OK, maybe those last two don't really sound all that relaxing, but the rest of the trip was.

My mom spent a while on Thanksgiving evening picking out a food processor for me for Christmas. It's already arrived, but I have not opened it, and have instead placed it in my bedroom and put the Jesus statue that Elizabeth and Ben got me for my birthday on top of it to keep me from opening it. Jesus hates when you open Christmas presents early, you know, because it makes Santa feel sad inside. After she spent all that time looking for my food processor, though, Mom decided that she needed one, too, so we decided to go get one on Black Friday. At the largest Wal-Mart in New York State.

I know it sounds like we were just asking for trouble, but we really, honestly thought that all of the crazy people would already be gone if we waited until after lunch.

We were wrong.

I only left my mom alone for a minute, while I went to go look for this, which they did not have. When I came back, my mom was standing in the appliance aisle while a small, angry woman glared at her and demanded to know if Mom intended to buy that food processor.

"It's the last one in the store! If you're not going to buy it, you put it down! You put it down right now!"

Lady, I don't think you know my mom, but she can be a little formidable. She also has guns. Plural. I don't know how you see this particular argument playing out, but I see it ending with you not having a food processor and maybe, you know, you also not having all of your limbs. Just walk away, lady, please. I don't want to get gore all over my shoes, because I only packed the one pair for the trip home. To paraphrase Danny Glover in "Silverado", lady, Mom don't wanna kill you and you don't wanna be dead. Just back away from the food processor and go home to your family.

Mom put the food processor in our cart, the lady wandered off, and no one had to die.

Then the next day we made pepper jelly! Delicious pepper jelly that I'm eating right now!

I've never made jelly before, but there's a lot of boiling involved. Three burners worth of boiling, plus the burner where you're actually making the jelly:

You have boil jars, lids, and rings, then lay them out to dry:

Then you chop up a bunch of red, green, and jalapeno peppers in the food processor that you won in Wal-Mart's arena of death:

add some vinegar and a gigantic six cup container of sugar:

and do some more boiling. Then, after you've boiled down the jelly, boiled the jars again, and boiled the tongs and funnel, you pour the jelly into the jars:

and carefully move the funnel from jar to jar without touching anything else so you don't have to boil it again. After the jars are filled, you boil them again so all the air slowly leaks out, a vacuum forms inside the jars, and it pulls the lid down and seals it:

Someday I might try canning, but there's so much boiling and so much risk of botulism if you do it wrong that for now, I will just be content to shovel Mom's delicious pepper jelly into my gaping maw.

Other than reading, making jelly, and harshly judging my town based on privately owned and installed landmarks, I found time to play with Mittens:

one of the outside cats that lives in the garage, so named because of his extra toes:

and with Ebby, the other garage cat, who I tried to capture with the pinhole camera:

I also walked around the village with the pinhole camera:

and think that the dreamy pinhole effect, combined with the overcast day, actually made everything look kind of sinister:

I did take a comparison shot of the pond with my regular camera:

and the pinhole, just to contrast the differences:

but the one that really strikes me as showing the total difference between camera types is the view of the Indian River from the vandalized footbridge.

Pinhole:

and a shot from the same angle in 2008:

You'd never guess they were the same place.

Travelling home, I almost lost all of the pinhole pictures. I haven't flown with film in our scary, post 9/11 world, because I've used digital cameras that whole time, so I've never checked on the restrictions or warnings since they've never applied. At the Syracuse airport I was instructed to hand my suitcase to the TSA agents, so I did, and as we watched it roll into the gigantic scanning machine the agent asked, "Guns? Explosives? Any film?"

"Yes," I said, as we both watched my bag vanish inside. "I... have film in there."

"Oh, well, you should have read all the signs before you handed me your bag, then."

OK, seriously? I realize that the TSA workers have minimal training, no union, and were probably exhausted from working through the Thanksgiving holiday and the volume of travellers involved, but he couldn't say anything as I handed him the bag? Or before he put it on the machine?

I raised my voice a little, even though I probably shouldn't have.

"When, exactly, was I supposed to read the signs? When I was getting herded through check in as fast as possible? When is there time to stop and read?"

He raised his voice just as loudly, leaning forward a little bit aggressively.

"Are you making a complaint? Do you need to step out of line?"

In a shocking moment of rational thought, I realized that the bag had already gone through. The film was already x-rayed. Nothing could be gained by arguing except ending up on a federal list, getting violated during a search that ignores my 4th amendment rights and presumes I am a criminal just because I purchased a plane ticket, missing my plane, or some combination of those.

"No, sorry. I'm just tired. I'm sure you are, too."

Then I seethed all the way home. Fortunately, my friend Prole said there was a chance that low speed film, like the pinhole camera uses, might not be fogged by x-rays, and I gave developing a try rather than throwing the roll away. I'm not exactly sure how many pictures I lost, but a few at the beginning of the roll did not come out and are lost and gone forever.

So what did we learn from all of this?

1) Packing a dozen books for a week of travel was a little overly ambitious. I only read six.

2) A food processor is totally worth dying for.

3) You should always buy your Christmas tree from a giant Frankenstein made of steel drums, if possible.

4) Film should go in your carryon, not your checked baggage.

5) My parents are awesome, and I had a really great vacation.

I lift my lamp beside the... gas station door?: Part 1 of my trip home

2011-12-03T15:06:00.006-05:00

Remember when I went to Bizarro Philly and mentioned that there's really nothing all that special about my hometown of Philadelphia, NY? All that has changed, and my town now has something of note.

I'm not talking about the historic one-room schoolhouse:

which they've sold off and had moved away since the last time I was home, or even the stretch limo up on blocks by the high school:

now in its second year of gracing the side of the road on Route 11. No, I'm talking about a semi-permanent monument, a symbol, the kind of thing that might pull some tourists off of the highway and show them that our town cares enough about our country to erect a statue in between the Stewart's Convenience Store, about which I have nothing but good things to say, and Philly Fuels, for which I have nothing but scorn.

I give you the Philadelphia, NY, Statue of Liberty and flagpole:

Let the kind of patriotism that only a ten foot replica statue of another, better monument somewhere else can provide wash over you for a moment, and then I'll take a moment to explain my simultaneous love and hate.

Why I love it: Oh, God, it's tacky. I love tacky roadside monuments like a pig loves rolling in mud.

Why I hate it: The Statue of Liberty celebrates America's welcoming and acceptance of immigrants from all over the world. My town, on the other hand, is pretty unwelcoming toward outsiders. When I was in high school the military base near the village was expanding, bringing in lots more kids to the school district. I was one of them, and for pretty much the entire time I was there the local chatter was all about "outsiders" and "transient military people" and "those people", and that's not even getting into the variety of racist terms that were bandied about since the high school stopped being all-white.

Not only that, but it stands in the village of Philadelphia, where summer jobs are only available to people who are related to other people who live in the village (a fact that was confirmed for me by my friend, the mayor's daughter), and it was purchased by and erected on the property of Philly Fuels, a business whose proprietor told me in the summer of 1994 that they only hire females to work in the store, because "Boys are too much trouble, and the trucks like to see girls behind the counter."

The idea that my village, home of the high school that willingly purchased alumni directory software that did not allow LGBT people to list a partner, rather than spouse, before gay marriage was legal in New York and then wouldn't ask the provider to change it, is suddenly welcoming to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the homeless, and the tempest-tossed strikes me as ridiculous, especially since the anti-Jewish graffiti that I noticed on village property in 2008:

still hasn't been cleaned off as of last week:

I suppose it's possible that some of the things I mentioned have changed since I was in high school and college and that my village is now a whole other place, but I seriously doubt it. Instead, I bet that from the outsider's perspective it's still pretty unwelcoming.

You probably wouldn't notice, though, if you only stopped long enough to get some gas and stare at our new statue.

How To "Score" With "Chicks"

2011-11-24T08:39:00.006-05:00

When I was a hall director, we had to go through every room in our building at the end of the year and personally assess it for damages. This included opening the closets, all drawers and doors in the room, lifting mattresses, etc., which meant that we looked into all sorts of spaces that students forgot to look into on their way out of the building, and sometimes found odd (and often disgusting) things. The policy at the school where I worked was that everything left behind was considered abandoned, but sometimes we would call students ("Hey, I found your passport in your desk. Do you want me to mail that to your home address?") and sometimes students would call us, like the time an RA called the office and spoke to my coworker, Leandra, to ask if we had happened to notice a "personal item" in his desk.

"You mean your DVD of 'Big Black Bootie'? Yes, we found that."

I don't remember if we ended up mailing "Big Black Bootie" home to him or not, but I do remember that for about a week there we'd just pass each other in the office and blurt, "Big Black Bootie! 6 hours!" (the only words on the front of the DVD case) and then break down in hysterical giggles.

Most of the stuff we found while searching rooms was pretty harmless ("Six rolls of masking tape! Let's take it to the office!"), occasionally usefull ("Oh, hey, I need a powerstrip!"), and sometimes, like when I found an unopened DVD of "The Lion King", kind of like a nice surprise. Then there were the times that we found things that were just weird, which is how I ended up with a copy of Frank Gray's Scoremanship: The Sensational New Approach to Success with Women. I don't remember who, specifically, worked with me when we found this, but I do remember sitting in the office for a few minutes and laughing while reading the really awful parts to my coworkers.

And let me tell you, this book is filled with really awful parts.

I must have put Scoremanship on my "unread books" pile, and then when I moved here it got packed with all of the other books. Somewhere along the way I kind of forgot about it, but when I was pulling books out of the "unread" pile for travel this year (the fact that a book I found over six years ago is still sitting in the unread pile should give you some idea of the size of the pile, which is stored in stacks beneath both my end tables and my coffee table) I found it and thought, "Hey, I remember that book. I wonder if it's still funny?"

It kind of is.

Published in 1969, this gives a window into a very different world, and not just because I'm not really interested in scoring with chicks. Every page drips with sexism, but also with a little bit of hilarity as you try to imagine someone using a line like, "Your lips are so luscious and tantalizing" (suggested on page 118 in the Words and phrases that emotionally motivate and stimulate section) and having that line actually work. I would ask if Frank Gray, the author, had ever actually had any success with an actual woman using this book, but he does provide six helpful case studies at the end that I'm sure he couldn't possibly have made up. I mean, I'm sure that lots of people have hooked up with a braless divorcee in the office of a furrier that they were watching while the owner was out of town, and scored with a model while on an out of town trip for an unspecified business, and yelled out to some girl on a sidewalk who was charmed into his car and then his hotel room by his smooth patter.

All that's missing is the case study where he was a fireman astronaut secret agent.

Anyway, just in case you're wondering how "you can become irresistible to women by using the tested techniques demonstrated in this detailed handbook", but don't have a copy of your own, I've distilled the finer points out for you, a process that involved reading the book and putting sticky tabs on various pages while my parents watched curiously but didn't ask questions.

1) Never call it "having sex". I'm sure this would also include calling it "hooking up" if that phrase had been invented yet in 1969. Instead, you should call it "having a love affair", because "the term 'love affair' dispels the harsh picture a girl may have about being 'used'." Because, you know, she's going to get used, but you want her to think that there was something special about it, and if you can convince her that it was really romantic, then she won't mind.

Why? Well, because...

2) Women can't think, because they have feelings. The book makes this clear over and over. "A woman will not respond to logic or reason any more than a deisel engine will respond to gas" (page 5, in the Understanding Her chapter), Gray asserts, in a manner that makes me wonder how many women have been unable to resist their emotional urge to slap the hell out of him. Not only are women incapable of decision and thought because they have too many feelings, but the secret to understanding a woman is knowing that she "longs to feel them surging through her", since they "cause her to take action" and she'd be completely unable to function otherwise.

Of course, the only action they really need to take is to submit to a man. After all, "she wants you to run the show, even if she doesn't want you to know it". Your job as the man is to make her feel things, because that's what she needs, and to keep her from having to decide things, because that's what she doesn't need, unless the things she's deciding include whether now is a good time to let you score, because that's what she does need, but she also needs you to call it a love affair, not scoring. Basically, if you treat all women like Ron Burgundy treats women, you'll be fine.

Now, at this point, you may be thinking to yourself, "But I know women, lots of women, and I'm pretty sure that they're not like this." I would say you might even be thinking, "But I'm a woman," but we already know from this book that if you're reading this and you are a woman, then you're probably only thinking about your feelings, or you might even have reached the point where "her mind goes blank, and she reacts only with her feelings". You're so filled with feelings that you may not even be able to read this far, right? Maybe you should go sit down and take your bra off, and I'll do the thinking for you, because that's what you feel like you want, anyway.

Back to the point I was making, this book explains that sure, you know lots of women, but you've probably never realized before that...

3) All women fall into easily defined categories. They are Single girls from sixteen to eighteen, which "are to be avoided on the grounds of moral responsibility"; Single girls from eighteen to twenty-five, which are "a good pond for the married man to fish in" (don't worry that being married will keep you from scoring a love affair; being married is what's known as "playing with a handicap" in the Scoreman game); Single women twenty-five and upward, who have either "had a lot of men or very few - there is no happy medium"; The engaged girl or the girl who is going steady, who "may be in doubt about her feelings" and therefor ripe for you to help her into a love affair; The married woman; The divorced woman, who "can be difficult" and "may resent all men because of her bad experience" or, I'm guessing, because of her experience with men like Frank Gray, the author; The beautiful woman; The swinger; and The mod chick, also known as "the instant score".

Types like The widow, The lesbian, and Girls who are intelligent apparently do not exist in Frank Gray's world.

Once you've understood the various types of chicks, you'll need to understand the most important lesson:

4) "No" doesn't mean "no". Perhaps this book should have been subtitled "The exciting world of date rape", because that's definitely where this point, reiterated over and over, seems to be going. "When a girl says 'no' she means 'maybe' and when she says 'maybe' she means 'yes'," according to Frank Gray. If a girl does tell you "no" and seems to mean it, "You can usually stop her with the simple question, 'Why?'", because "girls seldom are supplied with an answer to this question" and she'll be so confused by the fact that you asked it and the struggle to sort through her feelings enough to find a logical answer that you can just go back to what you were doing and she won't even notice. In fact, "you must never take 'no' for an answer; we know she doesn't actually mean it."

Frank Gray left out the part where later, you go to prison.

Just remember, though, that even though all girls want it, they all fall into specific categories, and their overwhelming feelings leave them powerless to resist, you shouldn't decide this based on what they're wearing. "A girl may be an atomic broad with ninety percent fallout, but still not be a player," (Really? Did people actually talk like this in 1969?) means that she might wear "tight, sexy clothes and low-cut necklines" but somehow still not be interested in having a love affair with a stud like you.

Anyway, now that you understand girls, you need to work on yourself a little (even though you're already halfway to perfect by virtue of not being a girl) so that you can attract the right kind of girl. What Gray says, in no uncertain terms, is that...

5) Guys need an image, and it needs to be one that thinks for the girl. This even works for nerds: "Many a man has talked his way into bed by impressing a girl with his intellect," especially since girls are so filled with feelings that they will hear what they want to hear, no matter what you say. "If you sketch the romantic picture, her excited mind will fill in the details." Just in case, though, you should keep yourself in shape, clean, and well dressed. And if a girl ever does question the decisions you make for her, you should be ready to distract her with complicated questions: Let her know that you'll be cooking dinner for her at your place, then ask "What would you rather have - spaghetti, or lasagna?" Just by picking a food, she will have accidentally agreed to come to your place for dinner. (See page 57 for more examples of The Distraction Techinique.)

And it's not just you and your image that might need fine tuning. You should also spruce up your apartment. "A luxurious sofa, soft cushions, books, add to the general romantic atmosphere, as do conversation pieces and, of course, liquor." Wait, I should decorate my apartment with liquor? Like just the bottles, or should I soak the luxurious sofa in vodka? "Always have a variety of wines and liquor on hand", but be careful: "A girl can become angry and hard to deal with under the effects of liquor, or she may completely fall apart and there is no conquest involved." Having been to a number of weddings with open bars, I kind of have to agree with that last point.

Getting back to my apartment, though, what kind of books? Current novels, of course, and "some books dealing with sex". That way, if she seems nervous, you can page through one of the sex books together and, again, her feelings will overwhelm her tiny female brain. I wish to God I was kidding. Just in case a book is too long, has too many pages, or not enough pictures, you can use "the better men's magazines, such as Playboy and Esquire" for the same purpose.

Now that we understand chicks, we've remade ourselves and our apartments to be irresistable to chicks, and we've practiced our lines and compliments, let's get right to kissing:

6) There are two kinds of kisses: icebreaker kisses and the message kiss. The message being, "Hey, let's have sex now." To be sure the message is properly conveyed, "Your lips have to be working, moving, talking" and you have to make sure you've properly timed the message kiss. Never hurry, because it shows a lack of confidence, but don't wait too long, because it may give her time to think about whether or not she actually wants to do this.

You should also be sure to grab her breasts. "Some girls will stop you when you start toward their breasts", but that's not because you didn't ask or you're violating their boundaries. No, it's because "many girls are unhappy about the size of their breasts".

Yeah, a straight guy totally wrote this book.

So you've gone ahead and scored. Now, how do you get out of this so you can move on to the next victim?

7) Girls will totally understand if you just stop calling. Don't stop right away. Instead, "you should let time lapse between dates and make the intervals successively longer". You might think you're just stringing her along, prolonging her agony, and giving her false hope each time you do call back and agree to go out again, but really "she will be sensitive enough to realize what is happening, and you will be able to leave her with a glowing impression of how lucky you were to have found each other."

I'm pretty sure that's the glow of female rage, Frank Gray, and that the impression will be delivered somewhere between your legs by a boot.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go class up my apartment with some copies of Playboy.

Thanks for the feedback, Walgreens

2011-11-20T17:13:00.003-05:00

Even though today was overcast, I decided to stick to my original plan of taking the pinhole camera to the Old Gray Cemetery downtown, because I'm still sticking with my plan of getting a better feel for the camera by photographing things and places that I am familiar with. I've photographed it in color and in black and white (getting better at black and white was 2010's photography goal), so I figured I might as well photograph it in pinhole, since that's my current kick.

Because of the low light, many of the photos are blurry and indistinct, which the lady at Walgreens was happy to inform me of when I came to pick them up.

"Your photos, they're all really hazy and blurry and weird."

Like your face, lady? I don't come here for your abuse. I have angry Ferro Lad for that. Maybe when you get done building your own camera from scratch we can talk about the photos that you take with it.

Or, you know, maybe I could learn to accept criticism without feeling like the only response is MURDER! SWEET HOT MURDER!

Rather than say any of that, or murdering her, I instead explained that it was a homemade camera with no lenses that doesn't work as well on cloudy days, and she and I had a nice conversation for a few minutes about pinhole cameras, where I learned to make one, and a photography class that she took a few years ago where she read about them. By the time we were done, my photos had gone from hazy, blurry, and weird to "That's so interesting!", so maybe she felt bad about her initial comments.

Either way, she is right. They are kind of hazy and a little blurry, but they also are interesting:

That line is a scratch on the film. I can see it on the negative. This line, however:

is some kind of processing error at Walgreens. It's not on the print or the negative, but there it is on the photo CD. I might scan the print in at some point, and replace this photo with the scan.

Or, you know, it could be a spirit photo.

I took several photos of statues, of which these three are the best and clearest:

The rest came out so blurry that you can't even tell they are statues, so I did not post them.

Here's another view of the cemetery, looking downhill:

and then these two are tied for my favorite of the day:

I guess I don't have to have a favorite, so I'll just say I like them both.

The Sinister Secret of Satan Girl

2011-11-15T21:57:00.004-05:00

My friend Steve usually uses an icon of one of the members as his profile picture, which is how I found out that he was also a huge fan of the Legion of Superheroes. Who else but a fan would know who Matter-Eater Lad is, much less have an icon of him? Anyway, we've talked about the icons a few times, and this morning he got someone on Facebook to make me an icon to represent Satan Girl, to use as my profile picture:

I, of course, thought this was awesome, but most of my friends didn't get it, and I ended up having to explain to a few who Satan Girl was:

"Oh, she's the villain from the story where all of the girl get a crimson plague and none of the boys can go near them."

Yeah. Someone totally approved that as a plot point. As my friend Prole put it: "Was it bring your non-subtle plot idea to work day?" Another friend, who immediately followed her statement with, "Oh, God, don't write on your blog that I said this," muttered grimly, "All the girls get a crimson plague? Really? And you wonder why more girls don't like comics."

Look, it's not as bad as the issue where all the girls get mind-controlled into beating up the boys by the man-hating queen of the planet Femnaz ("Adventure Comics" #326), and girls could learn a lot from comics. In the same way that comics instilled a healthy moral structure, sense of justice, and respect for the difference between right and wrong in me, there could be similar lessons waiting for potential female readers.

Let's take a look, shall we?

Our story opens with the girls out doing superheroic chores, and then suddenly falling ill:

Dizzy, weak, and turning red... something's terribly wrong. And in a defiant blow against sexism, Sun Boy manages to escort Shrinking Violet back to the clubhouse without asking if she has the vapors or if her humors are out of balance. He just calmly accepts that the girls are striken with a crimson plague, which the boys don't seem to catch, are somewhat suspicious of, and don't want to be around.

Fortunately, they don't have to be around it, because Night Girl, Legion-reject and secret member of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, volunteers to nurse the stricken girls:

But she also succumbs to the plague.

Now, I'd like to take a moment to address my nameless friend: Just because this is a story where a bunch of girls who all hang out together are suddenly stricken with a crimson plague at the same time, and another girl joins them and her crimson plague immediately matches up with the timing of their crimson plague, it doesn't mean anything sexist is going on here. This is a story written by men about a female-only crimson plague and how awful it is, not anything sexist.

Let's get back to our story, just in time for Superboy to be a total dick:

He's sending the girls into quarantine with a cheery, "You're doomed! I hope we can cure you before you all die!" and then he doesn't even try to find a cure. Nope. He flies away to another emergency, just like that time that hanging ghosts tried to kill his dad.

And also, that ship he made them all fly to Quarantine World on doesn't even have any chairs. Dick.

As soon as the girls are gone, in comes a potential replacement:

I don't really think she thought through the importance of first impressions when she was picking out her name.

"SATAN Girl? Why, with a name like that, how could we not sign you up immediately?"

She kind of doesn't take rejection well:

Yeah. She wanted to join the Legion of Superheroes, so she named herself after the devil, then poisoned all their female members, and then told the Legionnaires that she did it. I'm wondering if she decided to take superhero tips from Mnemonic Kid or something, because she's going about this all wrong.

Enraged by rejection, Satan Girl goes berserk, and decides to just go ahead and kill the other girls:

Supergirl shows up to save them, and Satan Girl gives her a move that I like to refer to as the Full Lois, right into a tree:

They fight for a few panels, and then Supergirl shoots her in the face with her heat vision:

Is that not badass?

Supergirl doesn't always get a lot of credit from comic fans as someone who kicks ass and takes names, but deciding, "Hey, this girl's pretty tough. I'm going to just go ahead and shoot her in the face. With laser beams," is pretty awesome. Sure, she was trying to melt off Satan Girl's lead-lined mask to figure out who she was, but still, someone who decides that the best way to solve a problem is to shoot someone else in the face with laser beams is someone that I want in my corner.

It's probably also one of the many reasons why God never gave me laser beam eyes.

Back to the story, there are several pages of Satan Girl chasing Supergirl and the Legion across the galaxy, continuing to zap the girls with her crimson plague beam and then deciding that she should probably just go ahead and kill Supergirl, too:

Despite being dazed and weakened by kryptonite poisoning, Supergirl maintains her newly minted badass status by opening a fresh can of whoop-ass: She sics a pack of angry, vicious animals on Satan Girl:

The Legion of Super-Pets.

First she shoots someone in the face with laser beams, then when that doesn't work she throws a cat, a dog, and an angry monkey at them and lets them get trampled by a horse.

Supergirl is stone cold, people.

Defeated, Satan Girl is finally unmasked...

And she's also Supergirl! Supergirl is so badass that she spent an entire issue beating up herself, thanks to the wonders of red kryptonite, which created a duplicate Supergirl who had to siphon off all of the red kryptonite energy or die. She shot herself in the face with laser beams, just to watch herself die:

So, what did we learn?

For starters, first impressions are important, especially when you're choosing a superhero name.

Second, sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to shoot someone in the face with lasers and then let your pets maul them to death.

Third, sometimes girls are stricken with a crimson plague, and boys should avoid them during these times.

And finally, Superboy is, more often than not, a total dick.

More Pinhole Camera!

2011-11-12T19:44:00.003-05:00

I continue to experiment with the pinhole camera that I built last weekend, although some of it turned out to be a bust. I tried some nighttime pictures with a four minute exposure, but all I got was blurry smudges. Either the pinhole is not good at full dark photos, something that the book of other people's photographs that came with it suggests is not true, or I need to leave the shutter open for much, much longer.

For the rest of the photos, I took the pinhole camera to familiar places, as I have the idea that I will learn how to manage it better if I practice on things that I already know and am used to photographing. Since I was already on campus for Open House, I figured I might as well start there.

I've mentioned before that I think that sculpture is pretty ugly, but it's softened and almost non-offensive here.

McClung Tower came out in surprisingly sharp focus, but "Europa and the Bull" in front of it is pretty indistinct:

(Side note: My class seemed rather surprised when I told them the myth behind that statue early in the semester, and that Europa was riding the bull and, later, riding the bull in a whole other sense. Yay for learning!)

I stuck the camera on a random tree branch, too, and got this shot, which I think is really pretty:

Completely unexpected, but that's part of the fun, I guess.

Before I left campus, I drove up the hill to Ayres Hall, which is recognizable even in this format:

Here's a photo I took another time with my regular camera, just for comparison:

It looks almost like an older photo, the kind you'd find in your parents's photo albums, and I was definitely right last week about things being clearer if I open the shutter for just a second or two longer.

I walked around campus a little more, taking some ugly photos with bad exposures that I didn't like and don't want to share, and then headed downtown to World's Fair Park. I was supposed to take pictures there last week, but ran out of film just as I got there, so this week I made up for it by studying the bridge:

and the Sunsphere:

And I accidentally took a picture of myself:

I guess I need to learn to lean a little further over, to get out of the frame, but there's always time for that next time.

Pinhole Camera

2011-11-06T15:09:00.004-05:00

This weekend, I built a camera myself, with my bare hands, out of metal and bronze, because I'm a man, and that's what men do. They build things. OK, it might be slightly more accurate and truthful to say that I built a camera out of cardstock, tape, glue, and tears.

A lot of tears.

But either way, I built a camera, and it works! I am a rockstar.

It all started when I saw this kit at Barnes and Noble:

with Jeannie and Kristin, when we took Jeannie out to help her recover from her really terrible day. At the time, I carried it around the store for a while, then convinced myself not to buy it and that I didn't need it. Then I went back two days later and bought it anyway, because I convinced myself that it would be easy and fun.

This will be totally easy and fun! It even says so on the box!

In the dark, desperate hours of construction last night I went back and checked, and it doesn't actually say that anywhere on the box. It says "Not a toy" and "Not intended for children", but nowhere does it use the words "easy" or "fun". I just imagined those words there, the same way that I imagined this would be a short, amusing little project.

I imagined so many things, before the page gluing incident.

I had so many dreams.

Anyway, I read the book that came with it, learning the mechanics behind pinhole cameras. If you don't feel like reading the wikipedia entry, in short it's a simple camera with no lens. Light enters through a pinhole to expose the film, and you open and close the shutter yourself. The pinhole camera in this kit is pretty simple, starting out with a few dowel rod pieces, a film cannister, a couple of pre-punched pinholes, and two sheets of cardstock that you punch the pieces out of:

The instructions were fairly well written, but should have had a time on there, because there was a lot of gluing, clipping the pieces to hold them, and then waiting for glue to dry:

A lot. Like waiting for a total of a couple of hours.

And in between there's time for non-crafty people like myself to realize that they've glued pieces together wrong, to realize that they've glued the shutter closed by accident, and to realize that they had glue on their fingers when they turned the pages and now the instructions are glued together and then a calm, rational person like myself who faces crisis with a level head and common sense has a complete meltdown and almost sets the pinhole camera on fire in the sink.

From Facebook:

OMG. I had glue on my fingers when I turned the pages and now part of the instructions got glued together and when I separated them part of the words got ripped. What if those words were important?

I'm not George Eastman. WHY AM I BUILDING MY OWN CAMERA? I own three cameras already. This is worse than when I took that shop class in seventh grade because they made us and I had to make that little motor and my damn motor wouldn't run for like 3/4 of the semester and everybody else had moved on to birdhouses and screwdrivers and I was still working on that effing engine so I wouldn't fail that damn class.

I'm going to go make some chocolate milk because I'm melting down like Shelley Winters in the back half of "A Place in the Sun" and I'm still waiting for glue to dry and at this point I have probably glued the camera to the countertop and not even noticed.

Yeah. Sometimes home projects are stressful, and different people cope in different ways. Also, if you haven't seen "A Place in the Sun", just click here, got to Part 6, skip to 9:20, and imagine me as Shelley Winters.

Eventually, though, the camera started to come together:

and actually look like a camera:

and then I was done, and ready to go:

I took it for a pretty long walk, covering two or three miles, and the bright sunlight helped a lot. The pinhole pictures have a weird, blurred quality, and in a lot of them you can see the round edges of the exposure. I think I need to leave the shutter open longer to bring them into sharper focus, but for a first try I think it came out pretty well, and I'm excited to try again.

For comparison purposes, here's a photo I took with the pinhole camera:

and one I took right after that with my regular camera of almost the same view:

The pinhole picture has a fuzzy, almost dreamlike quality. I guess I could get the same effect by digitally manipulating the photos, but these give me a sense of accomplishment. Some of them didn't come out so well, and some I overexposed by accident when I screwed up the winding for a couple of frames, but overall I think they make an interesting set:

(the wind was blowing the rosebushes in that one, which is why they're so blurry; because of the long exposure, the camera has to stay still and the subject does, too)

(that's the Henley Street bridge reconstruction in the background)

That's a lightpole with a Veteran's Day ribbon tied around it; I put the camera against the pole and hoped for something interesting.

While I was on the bridge taking the one of the traintracks, a real photographer with a fancy camera arrangement saw what I was doing and heard me counting the seconds out loud, and came over to ask about it. I was very excited, and still am. I haven't used film since I moved to Tennessee, having switched almost entirely to digital, and I forgot what it's like to not know how the pictures look until you pick them up, and to have to wind and think about where the sun is and not have an immediate do-over if you don't like something. I also forgot that you need to carry extra rolls, and ran out before I got back to the car.

That just means I have more film for next weekend.

Why does it have so many nipples?

2011-10-30T17:10:00.002-05:00

I frequently find myself questioning the things I see at the antique store. What is that? Why would someone buy that? What kind of home decor does that fit in with? After my trip today, when I stopped in while I was running errands, I have another question:

Why does that white pig with the giant ears have so many nipples?

And who's going to buy that? Who walks through the antique store and thinks, "Gosh, I really need... a seven inch pig ceramic lactating pig! Oh, happy day! This is the answer to my prayers!" other than someone with terrible, terrible issues?

It's like a Halloween farmyard nightmare.

"Race" implies "speed"

2011-10-24T18:42:00.002-05:00

This year, like I did last year, I participated in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure here in Knoxville. Backed by my sponsors, I raised $300 to help fight breast cancer, and I got to go for a brisk walk in the early morning.

The really early morning. It was cold, dark, and foggy when I left the house, and the sun was just coming up when I reached World's Fair Park for the race:

Last year I got there right before the race started, so there wasn't time to look around, but this year I got to stand on the Clinch Avenue bridge and watch people gather, and it convinced me of one important lesson:

When I do this next year I definitely need more pink than just the shirt and my bandanna. Given the slight difficulty I had purchasing a pink shirt, I'm thinking that for pink warmup pants I'm probably going to have to go ahead and just buy some from the women's department. Female friends, if there's anything I need to know about ladypants prior to purchase, please, feel free to offer some pointers.

The first pointer is probably going to be to just call them "pants".

Anyway, people eventually started lining up for the race, with the timed runners moving to the front:

and the rest of us massing behind them for the second start:

And then we were off!

At first, I was excited. I was moving at a steady, almost brisk pace, passing the river:

and the cheerleaders:

and then I got passed:

by a girl on crutches.

Let me repeat that, in case I'm not humiliated enough yet:

I got passed by a girl on crutches.

Not only that, but we weren't even at the first mile yet:

Another mile:

or two later:

and I still never caught up with that girl on crutches.

She didn't just pass me. She stayed ahead of me for the entire race.

ON CRUTCHES.

The loss of all that self esteem that was apparently weighing me down may have worked to my advantage, because I ended up with a decent time:

and a horrible sun flare in that photo.

Anyway, here I am at the end of the race:

I have no idea where the girl on crutches was, or what her time was, but clearly, I need to make better life choices.

Lois Lane: 24-Hour Black Lady

2011-10-15T06:51:00.004-05:00

I've been picking through my comic collection for the past couple of weeks because I'm pulling back issues for a presentation I'm doing, and it means that I keep running across hilarious back issues. It also means that, because I have trouble with impulse control, I've been reading a lot of back issues, since stories like the tragic tale of Fortress Lad or David Cassidy #1 never get old, and that's how I happened to stumble over "Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane" #106.

This is one of DC Comics' more famous (famous among comics fans, anyway) attempts at adressing a "serious issue", and like so many of the others it ends up kind of hilariously bad. It's not quite as terrible as when Green Arrow suddenly disovered that his sidekick, Speedy, was addicted to heroin:

but it is way more awful than the time the Legion of Superheroes tried to convince Tyroc that they weren't racists because they had a blue girl and a green guy:

Still, they were trying, so you kind of have to give the writers some kind of credit when they could have just said nothing at all. In some cases, though, you wonder if maybe silence would have been a better choice.

Like a very special episode of "Saved by the Bell" where Jessie takes too many caffeine pills or "90210" where David's friend plays with his parents' handgun and accidentally shoots himself, this issue starts off by immediately finding a way, however forced, to connect Lois to a social issue that she's never dealt with before or since. How do they do that?

Through Lois' all-consuming narcissism, of course. She doesn't want to expose the horrors of racism or help poor, oppressed people. Lois wants a Pulitzer, and if she has to take a taxi down to "Little Africa" (Really, DC? I've heard of cities with a Chinatown or a Little Italy, but I've never heard of a Little Africa where all the black people live) to do it, then she just needs a quick check in her makeup mirror and she's ready to go.

Before we follow her, take a second to notice just how annoyed Clark looks with this whole thing. You can tell that he's positively seething, thinking, "Great. Now I'm going to have to watch Lois all day while she goes downtown and irritates people. Damn it, I wish Titano would show up and start climbing the Daily Planet building before she had time to get a damn cab."

No such luck. Before you can say, "At least it's not a story about black kryptonite" Lois is downtown in Little Africa, and she's already running into trouble:

No one will talk to her. Why not?

She's whitey.

This story is much more hilarious, and actually makes more sense, if you imagine that children and old blind ladies at the bus stop are turning away from Lois not because she's white but because she's Lois Lane.

"Oh, shit. Lois Lane? I gotta get outta here before the whole neighborhood gets turned into witches or fat people or something."

Anyway, Superman checks in on Lois and finds her weeping on a park bench, her Pulitzer dreams shattered by her white skin:

She's drawing a blank, all right. A white blank. She has a plan, though, and I'm incredibly disappointed that they don't actually show her talking Superman into it. As you can see from the panels, she somehow convinces Superman to fly her to the Fortress of Solitude, so that he can use his super-advanced Kryptonian plastic surgery machine to make her a black lady so that she can win a Pulitzer. Again, I have to emphasize that Lois' motives are completely not altruistic. She doesn't want to help anyone but herself, and she somehow convinces Superman to go along with her. Nobody mentions that using kyrptonian super-science to turn yourself black so that you can win the Pulitzer instead of doing actual investigatory journalism for it is pretty much like using super tanning pills to get into Harvard on the Henry Q. Bouchard Memorial Scholarship, but the reader already knows this will be a disaster because, even black, she's still going to be Lois.

It happens pretty much just like on the cover, and there she is:

Lois Lane, 24-hour black lady.

And why does she have to get changed? Because even though all of the people in Little Africa were wearing average, contemporary fashion, Lois is going to be the blackest black lady ever, and puts on the Little Africa equivalent of Josie's first day of school outfit in Never Been Kissed:

She has to take the subway back to Little Africa because taxi cabs wouldn't stop for her now that she's black. I have no idea why everyone on the train is staring at her, though, other than the size of that head wrap. I mean, they live in a major metropolitan city that not only has a Little Africa but has a subway stop there. They must have seen a black lady on the subway before.

Once she returns to Little Africa, Lois goes back to the apartment building where the lady slammed the door in her face before, and immediately puts out a fire under their staircase. The grateful lady explains that the slumlord won't pay for a janitor to clean out the dangerous flammable trash, so it just builds up under the staircase, and then invites Lois in for coffee:

With a scoop of plaster. And a side of rat:

And here's why this irritates me: by placing this in the context of a "race" story, the writer implies that the reason this lady lives in the crumbling rat-infested fire trap tenement is that she's black, not that she's poor. They even back it up with the lady's, "I don't have to tell you about that", as if Lois knows exactly what it's like to live in a run down slum because she's black now. Granted, there's only so much they can cover in ten or twelve pages, and I'm sure someone somewhere could make the argument that she's poor because she's black, but this whole scene tells me way more about how the author thinks black people live than I actually wanted to know. It couldn't possibly be more stereotypical except for the part where the happy, nobly suffering poor black lady calls Lois her sister, just because they're both black:

Lois is, of course, moved to tears by the idea that she's now that much closer to her Pulitzer, and she heads out to find the guy who called her "whitey" earlier. No sooner than she does, though, do they see trouble in a nearby alley:

Man's business? I thought this was a comic about equality.

Lois and Dave follow the kids into the alley where, predictably enough, they interrupt a drug deal, and the drug dealers respond by opening fire:

Dave gets shot, or at least we imagine that he does, since he has no visible wounds:

It's too bad, really, that Lois doesn't have a boyfriend watching her, a boyfriend who's faster than a speeding bullet and could have maybe showed up to intervene before her new friend gets plugged in an alley. Just too bad. Or, possibly worse, it's too bad that maybe Superman let that guy get shot on purpose just to teach Lois a lesson. He was doing stuff like that all the time in the Silver Age.

Anyway, Superman disarms the drug dealers and flies Lois and Dave to the nearest hospital. Of course, since the hospital is also in Little Africa, all of the doctors and nurses are black:

And right there is why I think that Superman is maybe being a dick about this whole thing on purpose. According to the comic, "tense minutes tick by" as they wait for the blood typing information, but here's the problem: Superman has microscopic vision and a super-brain. He can see molecules and read protein chains. It should take him about a second to go, "Hey, doctor, that guy's type A negative," but instead he lets Lois pace the waiting room and twist in the wind for several tense minutes before we find out that she and Dave have the same blood type, and she can save him:

Or maybe he's trying to teach Dave a lesson about not being mean to white people. Who knows, really? It's just clear that Superman could be doing more, and isn't, but again, he was like that a lot in the Silver Age. Lois, also true to form, continues finding a way to make a tragic shooting all about her:

Did she really just accuse Superman of being a racist? She knows that when he was just a Superboy he was friends with a blue girl and a green guy. Sure, he did just let a black guy get all shot up in an alley and then stood around the waiting room uselessly when he could have done something to help, but seriously, Lois, some of his best friends are black. Just ask Tyroc, or Black Lightning, or... some other black people that Superman must have known in the Silver Age. Black Vulcan, maybe?

Anyway, before she can harangue him into proposing, Lois' transformation wears off, to the nurse's great surprise:

Lois seems pretty smug there, but I have to go with the nurse on this one. If I walked into a room and a lady had turned from black to white while I was gone, I'd be pretty damn surprised, too. The nurse isn't the only one who's surprised, though. Dave doesn't say anything when Lois, newly whitened, walks into his room, but he doesn't have to:

Because, really, we all learned something today. We learned that Superman is sometimes a dick, and that there's no length that Lois won't go to for a Pulitzer, even physically transforming her body with alien superscience no matter how risky or foolish that seems.

And also that coffee's not really good with plaster in it.

Arizona Part 2: "That's not really pronounced that way, is it?"

2011-10-09T15:44:00.002-05:00

In the previous entry I mentioned that the conference ended earlier than we expected on Wednesday, which left us with an open afternoon and a rental car, so we decided to drive to Sedona. I only know of Sedona as the place where Miranda moved up a shoot after she killed the autumn jackets feature in "The Devil Wears Prada", but Tim stopped by the concierge desk and picked up a map, leaving us slightly better equipped.

On the way there Tim asked if we wanted to stop at Montezuma Castle, and since we had nowhere else to go and no agenda for the day, we readily agreed. I'm so glad that we did, because it was a really interesting little walkaround. Montezuma Castle is a national park in Arizona:

which houses an impressive pre-Columbian cliff dwelling:

I don't know if it looks particularly impressive in any of those photos (especially the middle one, where you can see why it's being restored and you can't actually go up into the structure) but there's such a sense of history in visiting something like this, and also a little bit of awe when you imagine early settlers crossing Arizona, coming around the corner, and seeing a house set into the cliffside. I haven't traveled outside the United States in over a decade, and inside them I rarely see any mostly-intact structure over a few hundred years old. There are artifacts, like the Moon-Eyed People's wall:

that I saw in Georgia that time, or serpent mounds and other earthworks, but people didn't live in those like they did in a cliff dwelling:

It's one thing to look at a pile that used to be a house or a foundation, but to see the house itself is to feel a sense of continuity with the past, and I don't know that our mostly consumerist, disposable culture (which I fully participate in; I'm not lecturing anyone) gets enough of that.

On our way back to the car, I also saw a huge beetle, which was the only native wildlife I saw in the entire trip besides birds:

My fears about scorpions, poisonous spiders, rattlesnakes, vultures, vampire bats, coyotes, and other desert critters proved somewhat unfounded.

Once we were back in the car, we headed for another impressive but significantly more modern building, The Chapel of the Holy Cross on the outskirts of Sedona:

Comissioned by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, the church is designed to blend in with the surrounding countryside, which it does admirably well:

It's a bit of a hike up a twisty path to actually get there:

but when you do the simplicity of the interior is moving even for non-religious people:

It's very quiet and peaceful inside, but that may be due to everyone trying to catch their breath after the climb. Either way, it was another good stop on our day of sightseeing, and we immediately left the church and parked at a Horrhouse:

Grandma Horr's, to be exact. And yes, it really is pronounced the way it sounds.

Also, Grandma Horr makes a delicious dark chocolate coconut haystack.

We didn't spend more than an hour or two in Sedona:

so I didn't really get to see a lot of the town, but it reminded me a lot of Gatlinburg, in that it is a small town in a beautiful setting filled with touristy crap:

and signs with poor grammar:

Not that I don't love touristy crap. When Tim asked if there was anywhere in town specifically that we felt like stopping at, I immediately blurted, "The place with the giant chicken!"

Because, well, giant chicken. If I have to explain why we had to stop there then you really don't know me well enough yet. The place with the giant chicken turned out to be a wonderful store filled with random stuff for everybody, like cat Buddha:

regular Buddha:

and a really bloody Jesus:

Seriously, why are there multiple streams of blood running out from under Jesus' loincloth? What's going on under there? And who looks at that and thinks, "Perfect for the living room!"

Possibly the same people who buy ceramic pumpkins:

or random suns:

but I did find the room of drying peppers somewhat interesting:

mostly because it smelled so good.

We were all starting to get a little sleepy and jet-laggy at that point, so the place with the giant chicken was our last stop in Sedona, but we did get back to Scottsdale in time for me to meet up with Rod for a late dinner where we both ended up ordering the same thing, I guzzled about a gallon of diet Coke, and we debated whether playing "Piano Man" in a jazz restaurant was cliche or de rigueur. We did not come to an agreement, but a lovely time was had by all.

Then in the morning I had a long layover in Chicago:

and was back home and crashing in my bed by the time it was dark.

Arizona Part 1: "A Whole New Nothing"

2011-10-08T08:14:00.005-05:00

I spent most of this week in Arizona, which is beautiful but empty:

The emptiness probably contributes in large part to the beauty.

When I was in high school, college, and afterward my parents went to my Aunt Geri and Uncle Mike's house every Saturday night for pizza. Whichever of us kids were around would also go (technically I guess my cousins didn't "go", since it was always at their house and they already lived there) so I happened to be there one night when my aunt was complaining about wanting to get away from upstate New York.

"There's nothing here," Aunt Geri sighed over her pizza, her gestures punctuated with a cigarette. "I want to move."

"To where?" one of us asked. Aunt Geri seemed to think about it for a minute, and then apparently blurted the first state that popped into her head.

"Arizona."

I'm sure I smirked at this, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

"What's in Arizona?" my dad asked, and before Aunt Geri could answer Uncle Mike quipped, "A whole new nothing!"

That quote pops into my head every time I think about Arizona, probably because there are no competing musicals about that state (seriously, why has no one written "Arizona!" or "Tombstone on Ice" yet?) to squeeze it out, and I discovered this week that Arizona is a state full of nothing. Beautiful, desolate nothing:

I'm pretty sure I don't mean it in quite the same way as my uncle did.

We flew into Arizona, connected through Atlanta:

early on Sunday, and landed in Phoenix:

See how most of that picture is brown? Arizona is like that. If something's not irrigated, there's no grass, just some desert vegetation. It was weird to me for the first few days to see houses with lawns that were just bare gravel and cacti, but I guess if you live there you get used to it.

We landed at the oddly decorated Sky Harbor Airport:

and headed for our hotel, which immediately creeped me out. I don't know if you can tell from this picture:

and maybe it was just the western architecture in general, but all of the common spaces in the hotel made me think of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. This impression was only reinforced when I got to my very nice room:

and discovered that it was decorated with what seemed to be alternate cover art from The Gunslinger:

Then, as if I hadn't been horrified enough, I noticed that my balcony doors had a warning label, and should never, ever be opened:

I know that calling them "Desert Critters" is an attempt to downplay the seriousness of the local wildlife, but if you already have an overactive imagination then the first thing that pops into your head is a veritable flood of scorpions, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, vultures, and vampire bats pouring into your room at night.

After I saw that warning label, I never opened the balcony door again.

The hotel was actually really nice, though, with fancy showers:

and a quiet pool area:

where someone brought me a pitcher of ice water as soon as I sat down:

I never made it back out to the pool for the rest of the conference, but that one afternoon after being on planes all day was very nice.

Our dinner out in the desert was also nice.

I made friends:

ate in a barn:

while listening to a band:

and taught a coworker to make a s'more before we headed back to the hotel.

The conference was very informative, and also fun. I have pages of notes saved on my iPad, and also gave a presentation that was very well received. There was enough space between workshops and mealtimes to keep it from feeling like a grind, and the hotel food was great. I never managed to adjust to the time change and am paying for that now, but I had a really good time and got a lot out of it, so I'm glad I went.

And that it ended early enough on Wednesday for us to get in some sightseeing.

Men In Pink

2011-09-30T20:08:00.003-05:00

I've heard a friend speak a few times about gender roles, and how you get assigned yours at birth. No one asks, no one waits until you're a little older; they wipe off all the birth gunk, look between your legs, and decide, "Yup, you're a boy."

Or a girl.

Whichever parts you happen to have.

I first heard her discuss this over the summer, and I didn't really give it much thought until I ran into some pretty rigidly defined gender roles maybe a week or two later. See, Jeannie had a baby over the summer, and named her Violet. I decided that I was going to find some adorable violet baby clothes for her, and discovered over the course of a weekend that adorable violet baby clothes are pretty damn hard to come by. You can get a lot of pink, a lot of blue, and then if you really hunt some minty green, lemon chiffon yellow, and slightly-off white, but there's very little of that. For the most part, there's just an endless selection of blue and pink, over and over and over.

I discovered yesterday that it doesn't really change much when you get older.

Today's football game, being the first home game in October, is also the Pink Out Neyland Stadium event for Breast Cancer Awareness month, and participants were asked to wear something pink. I have to wear my white polo, since I'm working, so I needed a long sleeved pink shirt to wear under it. I already have pink shirts, because I need something to wear on Wednesdays, but they're short sleeved, so I headed to Wal-Mart to look for something cheap.

My friend Sandy suggested Wal-Mart, but said I should just get a women's pink t-shirt there. I balked, because I don't know if women's sizes are the same as men, I don't know if women's shirts have extra space up front for breasts and I worried about walking around with droopy extra fabric all bunched up there, but I figured it would at least be a good place to start. I was kind of wrong, in that I paced and paced and paced the men's department for several minutes and couldn't find pink anything. I must have looked suspicious, or they suddenly have a customer service philosophy, because eventually a sales associate came over and asked to help me.

"Yes, I'm looking for a long sleeved pink shirt, a button-down or a long sleeved polo or, you know, even a t-shirt is fine."

"Well, if it's for a lady, the women's department is over..."

"No, I need one in men's sizes."

Blank stare.

"For me."

"Oh. A pink shirt? For you? No, we don't have anything like that here."

Wow. Thanks for not shooting me.

Annoyed, I drove across the street to Target, where I had a similar experience and decided to just cut to the chase.

"The women's department is right over..."

"I'm gay."

"Oh. Well, um, maybe back by the summer stuff."

Yes, I know that straight guys also wear pink, and that I did a horrible job of breaking down gender roles by reinforcing homophobic stereotypes instead, but you know what? I needed a pink shirt, damn it, and I was already irritated by my Wal-Mart shopping experience. And then on top of all of that Target didn't have one.

But I found a nice Izod one at the mall, and it was on sale:

I was all set for the game, but the Pink Out Neyland event kind of turned out to be a bust. Very few people wore pink, although I did see a small group:

and some random stragglers, but that might also be because very few people came to the game at all. It's fall break right now, so the students are all gone. Plus we played Buffalo, which isn't even in our conference, and we're favored to come out 30 points ahead. It can't really be that much of a surprise that this was projected to be the lowest attended game in the last 20 years.

It looked fun, though:

And I did get a couple of compliments on my pink shirt.

The Ruins

2011-09-25T17:23:00.003-05:00

In May of 2010, I took my camera for a walk around our off campus apartment complex. The university had just closed it, since it had aged out of usefulness, and over the past few months a construction company has been slowly demolishing it to make way for new athletic fields.

They've gotten pretty far along:

but there's a lot of wreckage:

and a few walls left standing:

I drive past the deconstruction every day on my way home, and it's been interesting to watch the buildings slowly come down. When I took that walk last year I thought about how odd it was to think that within a year or two everything I was seeing would be gone, knocked down and carted away as if it was never there, but it's somehow stranger to witness it happening. Our lives are so often stories of things that are gone, things that we've lost, and places and people that no longer are, but there's something unsettling about watching a place that is become a place that was.

What does it tell us about ourselves?

There are people who gather at demolitions to watch the destruction. Every time I see a news clip about an old Vegas casino coming down (this used to happen with steady regularity before the recession; now I think they just bake and crumble in the sun instead) there was always a glimpse of a crowd pressed up against the police tape, cameras in hand, waiting for the building to implode in on itself and drop out of sight like a twenty-story magic trick. Why were those people there? What did they get out of it? Were they memorializing? Bearing witness? Did they find some sort of value in being one of the last people to see the Stardust, or is it more that they found value in watching it come down? A sense that an icon may fall, but they survived?

I'm not suggesting that our off campus apartments were icons, but, like the Biltmore Tourist Court sign or the Knoxville Art Bears, they are a part of our community's shared history, however small. For the past few weeks, as I've seen more and more of the rubble disappear each night as I drive past, I've felt like someone should at least take note of the process even though I'm not sure why.

Maybe it's just the sense that no one will ever see this again, and someday somebody might want to.

Peppered Scones with Pear and Goat Cheese

2011-09-11T17:20:00.002-05:00

Back when Borders was collapsing, I picked up this cookbook about "savory baking" off of the clearance rack. With the store closing discount added to the clearance rack discount it came to a dollar, which was more than low enough to pass my cookbook purchasing test. See, I flip through a cookbook at the store, and if I can find one recipe I want to make for each dollar that the cookbook costs, then I will seriously consider purchasing it. So far it's been a pretty safe and reliable rule, other than the breadmaking disaster, and even though I'm not really a baker I decided to give this a try.

Now I think I might make scones every weekend.

Seriously, these are better than the dense, crumbling scones at Starbucks. I am like a master sconemaker now, although, as always, I was filled with doubt.

I decided to make the peppered scones with pear and goat cheese, because I like scones, I like goat cheese, and I don't actively dislike pears. I also had most of the ingredients on hand, and really only had to pick up the perishables (a pear, whole milk, unsalted butter, goat cheese, and plain yogurt) at Kroger. The only thing I had trouble with was the plain yogurt, which apparently only comes in huge vats. I had no idea what I would do with a half gallon of yogurt, so I ended up getting a cup of vanilla flavor, which seemed plain enough.

The first thing I had to do was cube a stick of butter. I did it as fast as possible, and then put the bowl of cubes back in the refrigerator, because the recipe specified that the butter needed to be as cold as possible. Then I set the oven to preheat, and got to work coring, peeling, and dicing a pear:

I guess pears aren't in season right now, or people just don't eat them anymore, because those were the only pears they had at Kroger in the regular produce section. There were several varieties of pears in the expensive, organically raised section, but I was already buying a log of goat cheese, and peeling the pear probably takes off most of the pesticide, anyway.

(That opinion is based on my gut feeling, not on actual science.)

While the recipe specified that the butter should be in half inch cubes, it didn't mention what size dice the pear should be. I thought to myself, "How big a chunk of pear do I want to bite into while eating this scone?" and diced accordingly:

I know. My dicing is not even. I have poor knife skills, but I'm not a professional chef, ok?

After dicing the pear, I cubed the goat cheese into "walnut sized pieces" and then put the cheese and the pear in the refrigerator. The recipe didn't say to do that, but since I was going to mix it all together I had this idea in my head that the butter would stay colder until baking if there were other cold ingredients in the dough.

After that, I mixed the dry ingredients: salt, pepper, sugar, baking powder, and flour. As I could have predicted, I ended up with flour everywhere even though I was trying to be careful:

and then I added in the cubes of butter.

Then I was instructed to break up the butter cubes with my hands until the dough crumbled into pea-sized lumps. Wait, with my hands? I don't like getting my hands dirty in the kitchen. Maybe I could fish the butter chunks out, and then cut them into smaller pieces? Or make the dough with a potato masher? Then I remembered some show on the Food Network explaining once that you mix the dough with your hands because the heat of your hands will melt the butter a little, but not all the way, so I stuck my hands in and started crushing butter.

I immediately got butter and flour under my nails, and was disgusted, but I kept working until the dough crumbled:

Then I folded in the pear and goat cheese, and then folded in the milk and yogurt:

I might as well not even have bothered cleaning up the flour after I mixed the dry ingredients. I even had dough on the camera. Using a serving spoon and my hands, I broke the dough into six pieces, piled them on my baking sheet, and brushed them with milk:

"Brushed" is a subjective term. The milk wouldn't stick to the silicone brush I tried to use, so I ended up more or less slopping some milk on them and hoping for the best.

My hopes appeared rewarded a half hour later (time that I spent cleaning the countertop):

Not only were my scones lightly golden, but they looked shockingly like the scones in the book:

And they are delicious. They're light and fluffy, and there's a little bit of bite from the pepper mixed with a little bit of sweet from the pear. I'm already thinking that I could probably follow the same recipe with a diced apple and cheddar cheese and maybe even some bacon, and I've already eaten three of these for dinner even though it only makes six.

It's ok if I eat them all, because I'll probably be making scones again next weekend.

Achievement

2011-09-08T18:57:00.002-05:00

Like most people, I use the bathroom during the day.

Usually I do after lunch, but sometimes before. My schedule isn't really the important point here, though. Instead, I'm writing this to salute someone's achievement, to fling it out into cyberspace where it may or may not live forever, a lasting reminder to echo down the ages.

Someone is Ozymandias, King of kings, and wishes that you would look on his works, ye Mighty, and despair.

Not that Ozymandias. I was referencing the poem by Shelley, in response to the towering achievement that I witnessed today in the bathroom.

See, a few times a semester some poor custodian who makes minimum wage working all night after the offices have closed for the day spends hours scrubbing down the stalls in the men's rooms on my floor at work, removing all record of who's gay, who I should call for a good time, and what other names I can call the police, the president, rival athletic teams and schools, and the people who work at various offices around campus.

That time must have been fairly recent, because I noticed this inside the stall yesterday:

Congratulations, nameless Sharpee user.

I hope your accomplishment fills you with pride.

Rainy Weekend

2011-09-05T16:06:00.003-05:00

It's been raining for over 24 hours, but I've tried not to let it interfere with my plans for the weekend too much. Except for my plan to do laundry yesterday, because I haven't wanted to carry a basket of clothes through the rain to the laundry room, and it's too hard to juggle an umbrella and a full laundry basket. We're not into laundry danger territory yet, but in a few more days my reluctance to carry laundry through the rain may greatly lessen.

The weekend didn't start rainy. Saturday was actually sunny and hot when I got to campus for football:

Before we'd even gotten to kickoff, though, for our first home game of the season, disaster struck:

I guess they still play football in the rain, as long as there is no lightning, but if there is lightning then we have to clear the stadium until a half hour after the last lightning or thunder. Evacuating a hundred thousand people is surprisingly smooth and well orchestrated, and we usually send them to the basketball arena to ride out the storm, but this time it happened so fast that we let people stay in the gate areas:

Even with rain blowing in it was still dryer than being outside.

Eventually the lightning subsided and the game resumed, but I left after the end of the first quarter. I love the University and all, but I'm not sitting through rainy football just to prove it.

Sunday I didn't really do anything, other than read a book, watch a movie, play video games, and go to the store. It was a great day, except for the continued inability of the Kroger baggers to not mix hot food and cold food even though I very deliberately split them up on the conveyor belt at the register every single time. If they weren't cheaper than Food City I really might consider switching grocery stores, but I guess the low prices are the tradeoff I make for rage-inducing bagging.

This morning I had to go in to work for a minute.

Because sometimes I do. For no specific reason. And I don't want to say anything else about it, except that my plan for after work was to go walk down the Greenway by the Henley Street Bridge to see about taking some pictures. Although it was pouring, I took an umbrella and went anyway.

The Henley Street Bridge is one of three that connects Knoxville and South Knoxville, and is the one that I used to drive over every week to go to the comic store. Here it is in January 2010:

and here it is now, from almost the same angle:

Pretty much the entire bridge is gone. The arches are still intact:

but the roadway is completely gone, and the renovation and reconstruction is supposed to take two more years. In the meantime, there's a whole bunch of grey concrete, which looks even grayer in the pouring rain, and the whole thing has a kind of destroyed castle/post-apocolyptic feel.

It reminds me of pictures that you see of the bombed out parts of Europe after World War II; there's a lot of wreckage, and it's clear that a lot of things are gone, but the shapes of familiar things remain:

I also think I need to take more photo walks in the rain, even if it is hard to use a camera and an umbrella at the same time. It's peacful and quiet, and the pictures all end up with a streaky, grainy quality that I think I like.

The Fig and Cherry Tart

2011-08-27T17:42:00.003-05:00

Last week I kind of improvised a fig and cherry tart, then mentioned on Facebook that I had done so, and my mom has been asking for the recipe ever since. Normally I'd be flattered, since 99.9% of recipe exchanging between my mom and I consists of me calling, e-mailing, or Facebooking her and asking how to make something, but before I shared I wanted to be sure I could recreate it.

The first time, after all, could have been a fluke, and I dreaded Mom calling back to say, "I tried to make that fig tart the other night. It didn't turn out. Actually, it set the oven on fire, and the house burned down. We live in the motor home now, but we can't move it out of the driveway because the tires melted. Are you sure that was the right recipe?"

Better safe than sorry, I stopped at the store on the way home yesterday and picked up the two things I needed to give this a second try. I already had the third ingredient:

since pie crusts come in pairs.

I bought the pie crusts last week, because I was going to make a quiche and I'm the kind of lazy chef who doesn't make my own pastry crust. Instead, I used up all my eggs on that frittata I burned, so I was stuck with two pie crusts and no idea of what to do with them. I've never actually made a pie, other than a pasta pie several years ago, but I got to thinking about galettes and how much I used to love the ones at Bountiful Bread when I lived in Albany. Then I remembered that I had some fig spread in the refrigerator, and the idea for the tart slowly formed.

For the fig spread, you'll need:

1 bag of mission figs
1 10 to 14 oz jar of cherry or apricot preserves

I had fig spread in the refrigerator because I made it for Fancy Cheese Night, the occasion once a month or so when I decide that I'm having crackers and fancy cheese for dinner while I watch black and white movies. The recipe was in a magazine I read years ago, and was recommended as part of a cheese board because figs and cheese taste good together. If you drop it onto a cracker before you put the cheese on, it holds the cheese in place, and you don't have to worry about it siding off while you watch Bette Davis run someone over in a stolen motorcar.

To make the fig spread, remove the stems from all of the figs. Dump them into a food processor, then add all of the preserves and process the hell out of it. When you are done, it will look like this:

Since you are now the sort of fancy person who has fancy cheese nights, spoon the fig spread into your fanciest Gladware, and stick it in your fancy refrigerator until you have Fancy Cheese Night or until you decide that you want to make a fig tart instead.

To make the fig tart, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Then take the pie crust out of the refrigerator and set it on the counter. You want it chilled, not cold, when you work with it, or it will crack when you roll it out. After that, make the fig spread. (If you already made it and had it in the fridge, put it in the microwave for 30 seconds so that it is warm and spreadable.)

One note about the fig spread: Use preserves, not jelly. Preserves are thicker than jelly, which turns to liquid in the oven. Also, you want mission figs, not those weird Calmyrna figs.

Anyway, once you've made the spread and let the oven preheat all the way, it's time to roll out the pie crust onto a pan. I used a round pizza pan covered in parchment paper:

As you can see in the picture, I've also liberally poked it with a fork so it doesn't bubble up in the oven. Once you have the crust unrolled, spread it evenly with the fig spread to about a half inch from the edge, and then fold the edge up. You want to put the fold right where the spread stops, so that there will be some spread inside the crust and you won't be biting into a big, dry mouthful of pastry:

Once you've rolled up all the edges, put it in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes, until the crust is golden and the filling has turned a nice dark chocolate brown:

Let it cool completely, until it is at room temperature. Then cut it into wedges (I used a pizza wheel) and serve:

It tastes like a giant Fig Newton, and it's best with lots of milk.

Gray Day in Knoxville

2011-08-21T18:22:00.003-05:00

This morning it was cloudy and overcast. The weather kept seeming like it was going to rain, but then it would sprinkle for a second and nothing else would happen. I really wanted to get out of the house and take some pictures, though, so I decided to try to capture a little bit of the quiet, gray mood.

It helped that there were almost no people in sight at World's Fair Park, and the flat light left even familiar things looking washed out and tired.

No children at the playgrounds:

Nobody at the patio tables or sitting on the benches:

The Butcher Shop patio was empty because it's gone out of business:

The Veterans Memorial was also deserted:

And for the most part I just walked around the park alone:

Eventually the clouds broke and the sun came out, but by then I was already gone.

Safe Place for What, Exactly?

2011-08-20T11:49:00.004-05:00

I'm confused by this sign I saw at Kroger:

While I'm sure this made sense to whoever designed it, as a casual customer I'm confused about what, exactly, Kroger is asserting that they are a safe place for.

Interracial midget/giant dating? I'm only asking because that looks a lot like a big white person making out with a small black person, or at least hugging one. Or maybe the white person isn't really that much bigger, and just has a gigantic head?

Or maybe the sign is saying that Kroger is a safe place to grab people inappropriately from behind? I only suggest the inappropriate part because those hands are definitely in the "bad touch" zone if the smaller figure is female.

Maybe they're just saying that Kroger is a safe place to hug? I've never really seen anyone hugging there, but it's probably happened at least once, late at night, in the soft glow of the freezer cases as a low and moody Muzak version of "Strangers in the Night" softly hums overhead. Kroger is a safe place for love, good clean love, without utensils (unless you happen to be in Aisle 7).

Intrigued, I asked the cashier as I struggled to ignore the fact that she was bagging cold groceries and not cold groceries in the same bag even though I deliberately sent them down the conveyor belt well separated to keep that specific thing from happening.

"That Safe Place sign out front? The yellow one? What does that mean, exactly?"

"Oh, uh... it's, like, for child molestors."

Kroger is a safe place for child molestors? What? Did they sign an endorsement deal with the Michael Jackson estate or something?

Some version of this might have been clearly visible in my face, because she immediately added, "You know, to get away from them. It's a safe place to get away from child molestors."

Oh, of course. That was completely obvious, just by looking at the sign.

Late edit: My friends Cate and Rod (whose blog is temporarily offline) have informed me that the sign is for the national Safe Place program, which helps at-risk, runaway, and homeless youth. Although I still think the Kroger staff should have been able to tell me that when I asked, I could have also looked that up myself.

Sometimes I can be a real ass.

(That's according to me, not according to my friends Cate and Rod.)

frittata

2011-08-13T19:06:00.002-05:00

It's our busy time of year, when most of us in the department put in a week or two (or three, maybe more) of ten, twelve, and fourteen hour days, plus weekends, all leading up to move in. I'm not saying this as a complaint. I love my job, or else I wouldn't keep doing it. I'm just saying that most nights this week I've gotten home kind of tired and a little late.

And I've eaten pizza rolls for dinner for four nights out of the last five.

I bought a giant, family sized bag knowing that I would be too tired to cook anything, and that they can be microwaved quickly. I'm not alone in this. One of my coworkers bought ten or fifteen Healthy Choice dinners last time they were on sale and stockpiled them in the freezer, and another said that she's been cycling through the McDonald's dollar menu on her way home. (Names have been omitted to protect the innocent and their poor eating habits.)

Yesterday, though, I realized that I would be able to go home reasonably close to five today, so I paged through a couple of cookbooks before bed, decided to give the soup cookbook a rest for a little while, and found a frittata recipe in one of my appetizer books. I've never made a frittata before, but my mom did when I was little, so I was intrigued.

Granted, I'm pretty sure I never ate my mom's frittata, but that's because I didn't eat most foods that weren't made of cheese. It's no reflection on my mom's cooking.

Frittata seems pretty easy, but I blew it a little tiny bit at the end. We'll get to that, but first, there was mis en place with artichoke hearts:

leeks that were smaller than my fist:

and six eggs that needed to be beaten with tarragon, salt, and pepper:

Once that was done I started melting some butter:

and then cooking down the leeks:

Leeks, by the way, get really soft when they cook down, and lose all of that crunchy disgusting onion/celery texture that I hate so much. Anyway, once they were softened, I added the egg mixture and the artichoke hearts, and let it cook away on low:

This is where my frittata went slightly awry. According to the cookbook, I should let it cook until the bottom was set and the top was slightly liquid, then put it under the broiler for a few minutes until the top was done. My 8 inch fry pan (the size the recipe said to use) can't go under the broiler because the handle has a rubber grip, but the cookbook said that if a broiler was not available I could just let it keep cooking on the stovetop until the top was set, too, so that's what I did.

The cookbook did not mention that it takes approximately forever, and that it leaves the bottom right on the edge of burned:

It wasn't inedible or anything:

but there's a little bit of an almost too browned taste, and some of the leeks turned into tiny black flakes. I've since read online that you can also slide the frittata out of the pan when the bottom is done, then flip it over back into the pan so that you can cook the top for a few minutes, too. I'll try that next time.

In the meantime, I have some leftover frittata to eat with my pizza rolls tomorrow.

The National Knife Museum

2011-08-08T17:59:00.002-05:00

On Saturday morning, after Elizabeth and I went yard-saling for an hour or so (she bought a lamp and I bought a book for myself and one to donate to the resource center), I decided that since I was already awake and in the car, I would drive to the nearby National Knife Museum, located in Pigeon Forge in the gigantic multilevel Knifeworks store:

Then on Saturday afternoon and on and off during the day on Sunday I tried to think of an entertaining way to write about my trip, but kept running into a wall. You wouldn't think it would be hard to find something entertaining about a place where this brand of horror is the first thing you see:

Animatronic anthropomorphic animals with muscial instruments, covered in the preserved skins of actual animals. It's like a Chuck E. Cheese designed by John Wayne Gacy. It's also one of the few interesting parts of the trip because, unfortunately, the National Knife Museum is pretty boring.

Sorry, knife enthusiasts.

I really thought I would enjoy the trip. I'm not a knife craftsman (knifemaker?) or carnival sideshow performer, but I've watched a lot of horror movies and I cook a lot, so I have an appreciation for bladed weapons, and the knife museum and knife store has thousands of knives, swords, and other sharp objects. It just somehow managed to make them completely un-fun.

For starters, nothing in the museum is labeled. That means that if you do see something intriguing in one of the cases, like these wooden pocketknives:

you can't find out anything about them. Who carved them? For what purpose? And when? I'll never know, because the knife museum exists only to display knives, not to actually educate you about them.

There does seem to be some sort of order to the display cases, but this is just guesswork on my part. Here are the displays I think I saw, since there aren't any signs to tell me any different:

Animals That Died by Stabbing

The Knives That Won World War II

Knives of the American Old West, And Also a Gun

South American Knives Except for the Bottom One That Looks Asian

African Knives and Other Pointy Things

I Think This Is About the Civil War Except That One of the Coats is Red Instead of Gray

And that's it. I don't know if they were famous, historical, examples of something important in the hostory of knives, or if someone just cleaned out the knife sections at Pier One and the antique store and dumped the results into a few display cases. I learned nothing, except that knives exist and there are a lot of different kinds. Worst of all, I didn't even find the one famous knife that I was told to be there.

All I found was a poster:

You know what should be in a case, right next to that poster?

A bowie knife.

One that Rambo used to liberate entire countries of oppressed people in a movie.

But there's not. There's not even a plaque or a sign that tells you where the knife should be or if it was ever there at all. There's just a poster and a rack of dried fruit, down in the basement in the cooking section of the store that also happens to house the knife museum.

What a disappointment.

Weekend Blurbs

2011-07-31T18:03:00.002-05:00

It's still the time of year when I don't really go anywhere or do much besides work and sleep, so I don't have much to report for the weekend or many new photos. I do have a couple of small things, though.

1) Maple bacon donuts are delicious.

One of Kristin's staff members arrived to move in with two boxes of donuts from Julie Darling Donuts in Chattanooga, and when the desk staff opened the box to look inside, they discovered this:

A donut with maple frosting and bacon on top. (I think the official name on the menu is "Pancakes and Bacon".) I was of the opinion that I should eat it immediately and that everyone else should just back away from the donut box, because if ever a donut was created just for me it's that donut, but I'm not actually on Kristin's staff and the donuts were for them, so we took the box to her and then I begged for it.

Begged.

I have no shame.

Kristin broke off a little piece, because she was curious, and then I devoured the rest:

It was sweet and salty at the same time, and the donut itself was moist and slightly cakey, which is the way I like them, and I kind of want to drive to Chattanooga right now to pick up a dozen or so of them.

And then eat them in the car on the way home, cry, and turn around to get more.

2) On my way back from the office today I stopped at McKay's to turn in a small bag of books and look for a few new releases. While I was waiting for them to evaluate the books I'd brought in, I heard this in the aisles:

"Who's Ray Bradbury?"

"I think it's in fiction, but, like, the literature fiction, not the regular kind."

Wait, what?

I normally don't give other shoppers more than a passing glance, but I looked and saw two kids with a list in hand, probably buying cheap books for class. Do they not have high school English classes in Tennessee now? I thought Fahrenheit 451 was pretty much required reading at some point in your high school career, and if not that then maybe The Illustrated Man. I'm not saying you have to be familiar with his entire body of work, but is it really possible to get to college without having any idea of who Ray Bradbury is?

Maybe Tennessee should spend less time banning certain ideas from the schools and more time actually educating the students.

3) I invented the Braintini.

I found a silicone ice cube tray at Target yesterday that promised to make ice cubes shaped like brains. It was cheap, and I need fun in my life, so I bought it. Then today, when I was getting groceries, I decided to pick up some heinously green Hawaiian Punch to fill the tray with.

I recommend dropping the ice brain into the drink after, rather than pouring your drink over it, because otherwise your ice brain melts a little and the folds smooth out, just like Charlie's brain in Flowers for Algernon.

The kids in McKay's today probably haven't ever read that, either.

Happy Anniversary to Me!

2011-07-30T07:28:00.002-05:00

It's been five years since I packed up my stuff:

finished out the school year:

road tripped to Washington, DC:

went to Katie's wedding:

had my car totalled by a drunk driver:

moved into my first off-campus apartment:

unpacked:

bought grown up furniture:

got another car:

started work:

and fell deeply in love with Knoxville:

and the University:

It's been five years, and I'm so happy I came. I have worked with amazing students, faculty, staff, family members, alumni, and members of the community, and feel privileged to be a part of it.

And I hope I'm here for at least five more.

"I'm gonna need a bigger saw."

2011-07-27T21:18:00.003-05:00

I got home a little late tonight, because I had a 6 PM meeting with a committee that wanted to pick my brain and then somehow convinced me to think about presenting a program at their conference in October. I walked in a little after 7:30, and there was a definite smell of burning in the air.

Hmmmmm, I thought, checking for smoke. I wasn't here cooking anything, especially since I've been vomiting for a few days, so who burned something in the kitchen?

I didn't find anything burning, and nothing looked burned, so I got a drink and then rinsed out my glass.

Hmmmmm, I thought, checking to make sure that I'd turned the kitchen faucet to "hot". This hot water seems oddly cold, almost as if it's not really hot at all.

Shit.

I have no hot water in the kitchen.

I immediately tried the bathroom faucets, and discovered that I had no hot water anywhere in the apartment. Like any normal adult would, I spent twenty minutes cleaning the bathroom and tidying the living room, and then called the maintenance hotline for my apartment complex.

"There's no hot water? In any of the faucets?"

"No." I believe I covered that when I said, "There's no hot water in my apartment," but maybe I was somehow horribly unclear.

"I'll need to come over and check the heater."

"OK." Pause. "Where... is the heater?"

I'm asking because I'm terrified that I also need to go clean the other bathroom.

"Oh, your hot water heater is buried under your stove. I'll need to pull that out. Clear everything off the stove, if you have anything on there, and I'll be there in about thirty minutes."

But I didn't clean the stove! Are you sure the hot water heater can't be in the bathroom? Like, maybe it moved? I mean, I don't live in filthy squalor or anything, but it's been a rough week or two and my apartment looks kind of like I come home every day and do a slow motion collapse from the door to the fainting couch and then to the bed. There are dishes in the sink, there's some splattered dried cheese on the stovetop, and the kitchen is just really not at its best at the moment, so of course the hot water heater is hidden inside it like the half-rotted pit of an overripe peach.

I got things wiped down as best I could, decided there was no time to mop, and thought about dimming the lights, but then I was out of time, and the maintenance man arrived.

"Oh, smell that burning?" How could I possibly not? It smells like Smokey the Bear rolled around on my carpets. "That's the thermostat on your water heater. It's burned up."

"That seems not good." Nothing gets by me.

"Yeah. I have a replacement, but I'll need to pull that stove out."

So he did, and then realized that he still couldn't get to the water heater:

"I'm gonna need to saw through that cabinet."

So he did, after I took all of the glass baking dishes out of it, and then we realized that he still couldn't get to the water heater:

"I'm going to go get a different saw, because I need to saw through that cabinet, too, and it's thicker. I might be here until two in the morning if this is as bad as I think it is."

I'd like to vote against that.

After several minutes of noisy sawing, he finally got to the water heater:

"Look at that! It's burned AND melted!"

Yay....?

Eventually he wired in the replacement thermostat, which he said will last overnight so I can have a hot shower in the morning, and then tomorrow when I come home I will magically have a new hot water heater.

And possible some new cabinets.

Borders Watch 2011: My Week as a Vulture

2011-07-20T18:10:00.005-05:00

On Monday I read a news story that Borders Books had failed to find a buyer, and was going to have to liquidate all stock and close all of their stores, forever. While this is a terrible thing, because it means that thousands of people are about to be out of work, it's also a pretty good thing for two reasons:

1) Of all the major chain bookstores, Borders is the one I will miss least. Every time I get a Borders gift card, I end up spending most of it online because I usually have trouble finding what I want in the store. I'm not asking for obscure books, either, like a Nine Gates or a Gutenberg Bible; I'm asking in December for a book that was on the New York Times bestseller list in October, and there's not a single copy in the store.

You know why?

Because the bookstore is full of crap that isn't books. The Borders by me has a book and magazine section, a CD section, a DVD and Bluray section, a toy department, a board games area, a coffee bar, a Burt's Bees health and beauty section, a stationery and greeting cards area, candles, backpacks and other apparel, calendars, a candy and snack aisle, and some register space where you can pay for something that, in all likelihood, probably is not a book. If I wanted a bunch of other crap, I would go to Target or Wal Mart or some other store that doesn't claim to be a bookstore.

2) Who doesn't love a sale? As an American, I would like more things, please, but I would also like them at bargain basement prices. With that in mind, I started my Borders stakeout on Monday night, keeping a close eye on the store by my house.

Monday, Day 1 of Borders Watch:

Given the freshness of the disaster news, I didn't expect to see any signs up yet, but I did want to go in and see if there was actually something in stock that I might want to buy at the end of the week. I settled on Chuck Palahniuk's Tell-All, because it just came out in paperback, they have a lot of copies and should still have them by the end of the week, and the cover art looks like Lana Turner. You know how I love having dinner with Lana.

After scoping out both locations in the store where copies of the book were displayed, and then making a quick circuit of the bargain books section to see if there was anything I might want even cheaper, I left, content to circle the parking lot like a vulture circling a cowboy crossing the desert with no canteen.

Tuesday, Borders Watch Day 2:

I circled the parking lot again after work, doing a slow driveby of the front doors like a high school mean girl trying to intimidate my rival for prom queen. I'm out here, Borders, and I'm waiting.

There are no signs on the front of the store, but there are also no outside display tables or racks near the front, something I've only seen missing in bad weather. I'm not sure if it means something or if it's just close to closing time because I stayed after work too late.

On the way back to my apartment, I thought for a moment of the time way back in the fall of 1999 when my friend Donna and I went to the closing sale at Stop and Go Video in Cortland, NY. Stop and Go was a really old school video store (they all were back then), a Mom and Pop operation where all of the video boxes were on shelves with clothespins clipped to the front of the shelf. If you wanted that movie, you took the clothespin with the number on it to the counter and they got it for you. If the box was sitting there with no clothespins, all the copies were rented.

Blockbuster and Hollywood Video came to Cortland at about the same time, closer to campus than Stop and Go, and that pretty much killed the store. Video Circus (a slightly seedy video store which had a back room and an "erotic thriller" section that had every Shannon Tweed movie, ever; Shannon Tweed movies are an oddly fascinating exercise in discovering how many different jobs require you to take your top off, and you have to wonder if she just started inserting those scenes into the movies herself out of force of habit) was still open the last time I was in town, because it was in walking distance of campus and none of the other stores were, but the Stop and Go sale was sudden and frantic. They announced it in the morning, and when we got there at lunchtime the parking lot was packed. Inside, people were running to and fro with handfuls of clothespins, and the lines at the counter snaked almost to the front doors. I was enraged to discover that someone had the clothespin for the second half of "The Stand", but the first half was still there, because seriously? Who does that? Who buys half of a miniseries? What am I supposed to do with the other half?

Annoyed and mildly enraged, I ended up with The House of Yes, Freeway, Nowhere, and The Last Supper, none of which I still own because I no longer have a VCR. Still, I've always been a little miffed that I didn't get that copy of "The Stand".

That's not going to happen this time, Borders. I'm getting that copy of Tell-All even if I have to pry it from some other shopper's cold dead hands.

Wednesday, Borders Watch Day 3:

There were still no tables in front of the store, but still no signs on the windows. The parking lot was very full, though, so I was intrigued enough to go in. As I parked, a family of little people started getting into the car next to mine, and like an Ancient Greek I wondered if it was an omen. One of them had on a neck brace, which seemed even more tragic somehow than a neck injury normally would.

Inside the store, nothing was on clearance yet, but an employee was going through all of the front tables, book by book, and removing the "Preferred Members save an extra 20%" stickers from each book, implying that the whole store will go on percentage instead. I scoped out my copies of Tell-All to see how many were left and then left the store, biding my time.

Thursday, Borders Watch Day 4:

There still aren't any tables or racks out in front of the store. I guess Borders doesn't do that anymore, in their decline. The parking lot was very full, more so than yesterday, and it occured to me that I might not be the only vulture circling in the parking lot. I made a point of trying to remember some of the cars, to see if they also came tomorrow. As I drove past the front on my now familiar loop I noticed a small sign on the door, and two older ladies standing in front of it, reading.

A sign! This could be it!

I immediately pulled into a space and walked quickly to the door, but was sadly disappointed to read that it was not a store clearance notice. It was close, though:

Effective July 22:

-All sales are final
-Checks will no longer be accepted
-Borders Reward Points can no longer be used

Intrigued, I went inside to see if anything had changed since yesterday. All of the discount stickers were gone from the books except for the very front table, where the brand new bestseller releases are, and the books on the bargain racks. Everything else was apparently going to start at cover price before discounts were applied, which would be a little annoying if the closing discount was lower than the discount I would have gotten on Tuesday.

Also, there were still plenty of copies left of Tell-All, so I left the store with confidence, and decided that if the discount was really good, I would also look for In the Garden of Beasts when the sale finally started.

"Finally" would apparently be Friday, July 22.

Friday, the end of Borders Watch

As I approached Borders today, I could see cars parked all the way out to the street, and between the trees I glimpsed the sign:

The end had arrived.

It was time to get my copy of Tell-All.

The stack on the front table actually was depleted when I got inside the store, noticing on the way in that the small sign from yesterday had been replaced with giant window covering "Up To 40% Off!" signs instead. My slightly discounted (seriously, how can you have a going out of business sale at a bookstore and only have fiction 10% off?) copy of Tell-All safely in hand, I went to go look for a copy of In The Garden of Beasts, but was unsure of whether it would be in the 20% off History section or in the 10% off Biography section, since it was a story about a specific family. I couldn't find it in either section, nor on the 10% off New Hardcovers rack, so I went to the computers to look it up.

And discovered that they've shut off all the in-store computers.

Each monitor has a sign taped to it that says "We can no longer look up or order titles. Please ask an associate for help." This makes no sense to me. They could look up titles yesterday, and nothing changed between yesterday and today except that they hung up some signs. Suddenly they can no longer keep track of their stock, and even more surprisingly, the staff at Borders is going to suddenly be helpful after the ridiculously bad customer service I've received there in the past.

A while ago, I went to Borders to see if they had a copy of Queenpin. Even though it had just come out they didn't have any in stock, because they needed shelfspace in the bookstore for Legos or scented candles or something, so I went to ask if I could special order a copy.

"Oh, sure! Of course!" the guy at the information desk said. "Let me take you to the special order computer."

We then walked across the store to a computer that connected to the internet, and the guy directed me to Borders.com. I then got to look up my own book, enter my own ordering information, and have it shipped to my apartment, just like I could have done at home on my couch without even going to Borders. Thanks, Borders employee, for doing the bare minimum. If you'd at least ordered a copy to the store, I would have had to come back to the store to get it, increasing the chance that I wandered the aisles and bought something else. Instead I went home, waited for my book to arrive, and resolved to just order from Amazon from now on.

There's probably a lesson there about what went wrong at Borders as a whole, but I decided not to dwell on it and, instead, to go find an employee and ask for help in locating my book.

"Oh, we sold out of that about three weeks ago," she said, shrugging, and not asking if there was anything else she could help me find.

"Really?" I asked, taking on my comically haughtiest tone as I looked around at the line of shoppers picking over Borders' corpse and the limply hanging discount signs. "Well! I'll never shop here again!"

She looked at me for a second, until I smiled, and then burst out laughing.

"Yeah, I guess you won't. At least not after next week."

Freshly Strained

2011-07-17T10:01:00.002-05:00

Oranges are gross.

I'm not willing to debate this point. I'm just stating it as a fact. When you peel one, there's all that white stuff inside, and there are chewy parts and squishy parts, and membranes, and the whole thing is just vile. The idea of biting into an orange is roughly equal, in my head, to a zombie biting into a chewy squishy brain. If I were stranded on a desert island with only an orange tree, there's a good chance that I might die.

Orange juice, on the other hand, is delicious. Like an ugly duckling becoming a beautiful swan, somehow the lowly orange transforms into golden liquid sunshine, and all is right with the world.

Unless you accidentally buy the kind with pulp in it, like I did yesterday:

I'm not sure how this happened, but I have a few ideas:

1) Interference by an evil twin from a parallel earth. Homestyle, pulp-filled juice is exactly the opposite of the kind I meant to buy, so this is clearly part of a plot by Bizarro Joel and can only lead to ruin. I should ask Kroger to show me the security camera footage, so that we can see if the me who put this juice in my cart had a sinister black goatee.

2) Bad signage at Kroger. They can't even pluralize the word "toy":

How can we be sure that they labelled the orange juice shelves correctly to begin with? It's entirely possible that this is all Kroger's fault.

3) I wasn't paying attention. This seems the least likely scenario to me, mainly because it's the one where I assume blame. It's possible that while I was making sure I was getting the "not from concentrate" juice I forgot to also make sure I got the pulp free kind, but the idea that I make mistakes and that they are my own fault is as repulsive as the idea of biting into an orange.

Let's just blame this on Bizarro, instead.

It wasn't until I got the juice home and started to pour a glass that I realized it was the bad kind, and then I was stuck. You can't take opened juice back to the store, but juice is too expensive to just throw away because it has pulp in it. I thought about flinging the glass against the wall while shrieking, like JLo does when an assistant brings her a warm Diet Coke, but that doesn't really solve the problem. My next thought was that I could strain it, and filter out all the pulp, but would that actually work?

Let's find out!

I had all the hardware, so I poured in some juice and immediately ran into a problem:

There's so much pulp that it made the juice pool up and not pour down into the jug. I grabbed a wooden spoon, and was careful to stir, not press, because pressing might push some pulp through the strainer:

Eventually, all the juice went through, and I was just left with a lot of pulp:

I cannot possibly shudder enough.

After rinsing out the strainer a few times, I eventually filtered the entire half gallon of juice, and then drank a whole bunch.

Better luck next time, Bizarro!

A Tale of Two Sun Eaters

2011-07-13T20:24:00.002-05:00

I haven't updated in a few weeks, because I've been really busy at work, and have had to go in the last two weekends in a row as well as staying late a lot. Remember back in December and January when my coworkers and I had to fight the Sun Eater?

Ferro Lad? What are you doing here?

I mean, I'm glad you suddenly seem not to be dead anymore, but I was right in the middle of explaining how I've been spending the last couple of weeks fighting the Student Billing Statements Sun Eater, and

Well, you know, it's more of a metaphor, really.

Well, you know, it was kind of horrible anyway, even if it wasn't a real Sun Eater.

I... fell asleep early and missed one of my shows?

It's really nice of you to recognize that, and...

Hey, where are you going?

Ferro Lad?

Creamy Hearts of Palm Soup

2011-07-02T20:44:00.002-05:00

Today I continued working through the 400 Soups cookbook that I got on the bargain rack when I picked up Countess LuAnn of New York's Classy Book of Classy Etiquette. Given the success of the spicy cauliflower soup and the easy pea soup (which, as my friend Justin suggested, was even better with the addition of cream and bacon), I figured I could branch out and try something completely new, and settled on the creamy hearts of palm soup since it used a leek and two cans of hearts of palm.

I've never cooked with either of those, or to my knowledge, eaten them.

I do know, from "Top Chef", that a leek is kind of like a big onion. I didn't realize how big until I got to Earthfare (no leeks at Kroger, I'm afraid) and picked one out:

It's like a club! If I got mugged on the way home from the store I could totally fight someone off with my leek. You could play baseball with that thing.

Of course, now that I had a leek I had little idea of what to do with it. I knew it needed washing, because I remember someone on "Top Chef" being accused of having sandy leeks (I can't remember who, but I want to say it was Top Scallops Jamie), but I had no idea if I was supposed to used the white part or the green part or peel it or what. Fortunately, a quick google search informed me that I should cut off the bottom, then cut off the leaves where the light green part started to darken. Once that was done, I cut up an onion and then peeled and diced a potato, and my mis en place was done except for draining the hearts of palm.

I have no idea what part of the palm the heart comes from, but they look like this when you dump a pre-sliced can of them into a strainer:

Do palm trees have fruit? Is the heart from some sort of palm fruit? Or is it something more sinister, like the palm tree gets knocked out and wakes up in the thugee temple under the palace and then gets chained into a harness and then Mola Ram reaches into the palm tree's chest and pulls out the still beating heart of palm with his bare hand and throws it into a Kroger can while the cultists chant and pray to the Sankara stones?

Who cares? After all the slicing and dicing prep work I was too hungry to worry.

The soup came together in stages, but it was fairly simple. I started by melting butter in my soup pot (I've gotten really good at doing this slowly and patiently rather than turning the heat up really high and burning the butter to a brown smear on the bottom of the pain) along with some olive oil, and then cooking down the onion and leeks in it:

After that I added flour, chicken stock, and the chunks of potato, and then ten minutes later heavy cream and the hearts of palm:

and then the whole thing eventually went into the blender. I was going to use my immersion blender, but that always seems to miss a chunk of something here and there, and I wanted this pureed all the way down since there was a whole onion in it. While it was baking I put a loaf of bread in the oven (a Kroger take and bake loaf, since we already know that my homemade bread is awful, nightmare fuel) and suddenly dinner was served:

I'm not sure what a heart of palm tastes like, exactly, but the soup has a creamy taste with a slightly sweet undertone, and I didn't taste the onion at all.

"What if it stops up the toilet?"

2011-06-26T19:31:00.002-05:00

I spent my weekend at the Ignite Summit, a fantastic summer event at work where we take some of the incoming freshmen class into the woods for a weekend and put them through some teambuilding, some fun, some of both (this, for example:

is a minefield made of rubber pigs and softballs; it is both amusing and, in the right context, completely terrifying),

some leadership development, some tradition building, and some hardcore bonding. This is the first year I've been invited to help facilitate, and this was the best weekend I've had in a really long time.

I don't want to post too much about the summit itself for two reasons:

1) What happens at summit stays at summit. There is a bond of trust and shared experience, and while I can say that I had a lot of fun and the best team ever:

(one of whom is not pictured because she's holding my camera to take that picture) there are also a lot of things that are only for us. I laughed a lot, I cried a little (which was kind of horrible because it made some bug spray get into my eye and that hurt A LOT), and I hope I get asked back next year.

2) There's a second summit in August for an entirely different group of freshmen, and just in case someone googles the summit I want them to still be surprised rather than them seeing a picture of all of us playing "Ride the Pony" or working on the challenge course. I won't be at the August summit because it's right before the buildings open, and I'm usually pretty busy then.

Given that, here are some random photos. I didn't take very many pictures this weekend, anyway, because I was busy participating, but I did take advantage of our afternoon free time to shoot the windmill and fire engine on the property.

I also took this one of people learning to line dance at the hoedown on Saturday night:

Since I don't want to talk about the summit activities themselves, I'll instead share a tale of terror from the camp bathrooms.

The retreat center is pretty far out in the country; so far out that there is no cell phone service. You know that scene in "Friday the 13th" or "Cabin Fever" or "Wrong Turn" or any horror movie made post-1990 or so where all the characters hold up their phones and complain about getting no service and the viewing audience always accepts it as a suspension-of-disbelief genre conceit, because we know that the movie would actually be over in about twenty minutes if they could call someone? That actually happens. Today on the ride back, there were multiple beeps and dings in the van when we crossed a magical line and everyone's phone suddenly started working again.

I bring that up because I'm trying to say that the facilities are a little rustic. This, for example, is where I slept:

Yeah.

You can't see it in that picture, but that is a cabin for eight with one shower, one toilet, and no latch on the plywood bathroom door. It was kind of full of spiders and the floor was kind of dirty and the tub kind of had a fine layer of topsoil in the bottom that didn't wash out, ever, but at least we had a bathroom, and at least it was attached to our cabin and not in another building.

Anyway, Saturday night I was walking back up to our cabin and was intercepted by Richie and Mark, two of my cabin mates.

"There's a dead mouse in the toilet."

"What?"

"There's a dead, drowned mouse in the toilet."

"What?"

I've traveled all over the North American continent. I've been to 40 or so states (I've lost track) and most of the Canadian provinces. I've gone to the bathroom in some really, really sketchy places. When we lived in Alaska, many of the places we stopped had outhouses, and still, I don't remember ever seeing a dead mammal in any of them.

"It's, like, floating with its legs up and stuff," Richie said, demonstrating.

"Let me get my camera!"

Of course, that still left us with the question of what to do with it.

"Let's just flush it," Mark suggested.

"What if it gets stuck?" I countered. "What if it stops up the toilet?"

"It won't get stuck," Richie asserted, based on zero evidence.

"I'm gonna flush it!" Mark announced, heading into the bathroom. A moment later, we heard a flush. "It went down."

And I didn't go back in the bathroom again all weekend.

Pride Month Special: Wonder Woman and the Drag King S&M Street Gang

2011-06-19T16:55:00.005-05:00

I read a decent number of books and articles about comic books, as well as a decent number of books and articles about gay topics, but I read a much smaller number of books and articles where the two areas overlap. When they do I take note, and over the past year or so I've read three different things that referenced "Wonder Woman" #185, "THEM!"

Or, as I've seen it referred to: the one where Wonder Woman fights ssome lesbians, the one with the drag kings, and the one where someone was bound in a Wonder Woman comic who actually wasn't Wonder Woman.

Intrigued, I attempted to track a copy of the book, but an issue of "Wonder Woman" from December 1969 isn't always the easiest thing to come by, or the cheapest. Fortunately, DC Comics reprinted it fairly recently in Diana Prince: Wonder Woman Volume 2, a series of compilations chronicling the period when Wonder Woman gave up her powers to live as Diana Prince among the common people of Man's World. Like most common people in the early 1970's she dressed in white jumpsuits a lot, acquired a blind sensei and became proficient in martial arts, and opened a dress shop in "The Village", a neighborhood in a large city on the east coast that's never actually identified as Greenwich Village but clearly is.

For me, the high point of this period in Wonder Woman's life has always been the story in "Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane" (also reprinted in this volume, but I've read it before) where the depowered Diana Prince falls in love with Superman, and Lois is forced to document their romance for the Daily Planet, sobbing behind her camera lens and dying inside. In typical Silver Age fashion, Lois decides that the best way to settle this is to challenge Wonder Woman to a fight for Superman's love.

Wonder Woman responds by straight up beating the hell out of Lois Lane:

until Lois can't even stand:

and then, since Lois lost, Superman is totally fine with leaving her crying in the dirt and flying away:

It cannot be stated enough times that the Silver Age Superman was kind of a dick.

Now that I've read "THEM!", though, I have to say that my favorite story from this period of "Wonder Woman" is still the one where she beats up Lois (it turned out not to be Wonder Woman, anyway, and was instead Kryptonian criminal and Phantom Zone escapee Ar-Ual in disguise; you may remember the Phantom Zone criminals from that time they used the telepathic metal alien bust of Superboy to try to murder his adoptive father), because "THEM!", while interesting, is also just not a very good comic.

Our story opens with Diana Prince returning to her dress shop from a trip home to Paradise Island and discovering a blonde teenaged runaway hiding in her dress shop, which was somewhat common in the 1970's:

The girl is so terrified of THEM! that it's practically all she can babble about, in bold red letters as Diana attempts to question her:

The art is a little unclear there, but is that girl crawling across the floor of the dress shop in terror? I picture her skittering away from Wonder Woman while babbling, but it does her no good, because Wonder Woman has been followed into her shop by THEM!:

Is there a ramp in that picture that I can't see? Because the doorframe of the dress shop is parallel to the top of the panel, but THEM! are angling away to the upper left, against the laws of physics as I understand THEM! In any case, let's take a closer look at our adversaries, since I've read so much about THEM!:

The one on the left is called Moose Mama, but it wasn't until I learned her name a page or two later that I realized that the character was female. She has no obvious female secondary sex characteristics, and in the full page picture it kind of looks like there's a bulge in her jeans. I totally read that as a male until they said her name, and many commentators say that she's supposed to be a butch lesbian. It's true that she could be, and the Comics Code would not have let them say so (no character in a code-approved comic was ever explicitly stated to be gay until Northstar did in "Alpha Flight" #106 in 1992), but I think the commentators are also making an unfair assumption that a masculine woman must be a lesbian. Given that this is Moose Mama's only appearance, ever, and she is such a secondary character that she doesn't even have any dialogue, we'll never know.

The one on the right, in the cowboy hat, is called Pinto, and she is probably a drag king, given her outfit. She could just be a cowgirl, but she's chosen a name that leans more toward the masculine side to go with her persona, so I'm going to say yeah, she's a drag king even though walking around dressed as a cowboy isn't really all that odd in a universe where a man dressed as a bat regularly fights a woman dressed as a cat and a man dressed as a clown. She's a woman impersonating a male, but that still doesn't make her a lesbian. Drag kings and drag queens are often gay, but not always. Like Moose Mama, Pinto is a secondary character, so we'll never really know.

We do know that Top Hat, the one in the middle and leader of THEM!, is apparently not 100% straight. Other commentators have pointed out that she's in drag king dress, too, and I'll agree. She's wearing a pretty masculine outfit, and the pink glasses, big rings, and fancy hat give the whole thing a kind of disco-pimp look. We know that she's probably not straight because Cathy, our teenaged runaway, is also her slave, and we know that because Top Hat has brought along Cathy's collar and would like for her to put it back on:

Top Hat, clearly, is also into some bondage and domination.

Wonder Woman is having none of this, and beats up the three of THEM! as handily as she dispatched Lois. She takes Cathy in, and then Top Hat and THEM! begin a campaign of terror where they throw a brick through the window, stand outside yelling all night, send gang members into the shop to slice up the merchandise, and have Mingo, one of their male gang members, knock groceries out of Diana's hands:

Mingo is suddenly terrified into buying Diana and Cathy new groceries by the appearance of a mysterious stranger:

and here's two of the reasons why this is a bad comic:

1) We never find out, ever, why Top Hat and THEM! are scared of Tony. There's a lot of sneering and retreating:

but never an explanation of why.

2) Wonder Woman, a superhero who handily beat up three gang members at once less than five pages ago, can't handle a guy knocking a grocery bag out of her hands without a man to step in and save her. Yay, feminism!

Since their annoying pranks aren't making Cathy come back, Top Hat and THEM! decide to ramp things up by burning down the dress shop:

at which point Tony steps in and saves the helpless Wonder Woman again, by having his mother invite THEM! (ooops, sorry) them to stay in his sister Angela's room:

In another plot flaw, the story makes a point of having Mrs. Petrucci explain with a sad faced that Angela is "away", but never says where she went or why. This would have been the perfect time to tie together the issues of Top Hat's mysterious fear of Tony and Tony's mysteriously missing sister by revealing that Top Hat IS Angela, but this doesn't happen. We find out much later (not even in this volume) that there's a whole other story with Angela and Tony that this was just foreshadowing for, but we never find out why Top Hat and THEM! were scared of Tony.

Anyway, after a good night's sleep in Angela's room, Diana wakes up to discover that Cathy is gone:

and also that Angela kept both a black pen and a thick red marker in her room next to her writing paper.

Diana goes out searching for Cathy and Mrs. Petrucci goes searching for Tony:

and then for a washcloth since her hair dye is melting down her face. Diana doesn't have to look very far, though, because Top Hat is parading her slave through The Village with an entourage of THEM!:

Again, if you didn't know Moose Mama was a woman, she'd blend right in with the rest of the henchmen. Diana confronts the entire gang, Top Hat starts monologuing like villains almost always tend to do, and Tony and his guys use that time to somehow silently overpower and disarm all of THEM! while Diana has Top Hat distracted:

because, again, Wonder Woman needs a man to save her in her own comic book.

She does manage to give Top Hat the "full Lois" herself:

slapping her hard enough to add some extra letters to the word:

and that's when the police reveal that in addition to being a kidnapper, rapist, human trafficker, gang leader, arsonist, vandal, drag king, and probable lesbian, Top Hat is also a robber:

She's carrying the loot inside her hat.

That, I think, is the biggest flaw in this story. Rather than waving her knife-tipped umbrella around through the story, Top Hat should have been pulling crap out of her hat. It's like the author was confused about how comics work. Kite Man uses a lot of kites (or did before he died), Stilt Man commits crimes on giant stilts, Catwoman always uses a cat motif, Sun Boy has solar powers, Invisible Girl turns invisible, Aquaman lives in water, Green Arrow shoots green arrows, and Top Hat... uses an umbrella.

Comic writing fail.

I guess I was mostly disappointed about this issue because I was expecting so much more. As a gay man, yes, I recognize that this issue is full of gay subtext that couldn't be explicitly stated on the page, and expresses a lot of it really well given the boundaries that the creative team was working under. From the perspective of a comic fan, though, this is a pretty bad issue, and it's no wonder that comic fans never again saw Top Hat or THEM!

Cheating?

2011-06-14T20:46:00.002-05:00

Remember that time I won the Murder Game? I'm sure you do, since it's one of the defining moments of our generation. People are always asking each other, in hushed and slightly reverential terms, "Where were you when you found out that Joel won the Murder Game?"

I know I'll never forget where I was, mostly because I won.

Recently (like within the last few hours), Kristin has accused me of cheating at the Murder Game, and has suggested that I might have googled "Murder Game Lethal Luau" and then watched a ten minute video of the important parts of the Murder Game on YouTube several times before attending the birthday murder dinner. She also alleges that I allegedly confessed watching this alleged YouTube video to her, and then she posted the alleged details of this alleged confession on her alleged Facebook page. She's thrown out a serious allegation about this alleged cheating that I allegedly confessed to, and now I have no choice but to respond.

How best to do so, though?

I could start by attacking my accuser and attempting to cloud the issue. I mean, sure, Kristin says that I cheated at the Murder Game, and maybe I did, but let's not forget that Kristin... is a smoker. She smokes cigarettes, and sometimes, she puts them out and leaves the cigarette on the ground and just walks away. Nevermind that birds might eat them and die, or they might drift into piles on people's lawns or porches. Small children might pick up those littered butts and put them in their mouths, and won't somebody think of the children? Am I the only one here who's worried about them? I believe that children are our future, and they shouldn't have to live in a world of discarded cigarette butts.

Kristin says "cheating" and I say "children", and which of those do you like more?

Please, think of the children before you answer, and also think about another way that I could respond, which is by trying to claim the moral high ground. In Victor Hugo's immortal classic Les Miserables, Jean Valjean is relentlessly pursued for nineteen years by the obsessed policeman, Javert, for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. It is the story of a man who is completely destroyed by his accuser just for trying to survive, and in the end the actual crime of stealing bread is insignificant compared to the cruel and relentless pursuit of "justice" and "punishment". In thinking of the tragedy of one decent and caring man torn to shreds for the pettiest of crimes, all I can do is ask, "Would you steal a loaf of bread to feed your family?" Of course you would, but what if your family didn't need bread? What if your family needed to win the Murder Game?

Exactly. You'd do what was best for your family.

On the other hand, I could just respond the way Batman would. A few years ago, the Justice League fought a villain named Prometheus. He was a master strategist, but he was also a master fighter, because he had a special computerized helmet wired into his nervous system, and he used that helmet to download the fighting styles of the best martial artists on the planet, including Batman. The problem was that while Prometheus was throwing Barbara Gordon out of a window she managed to snap a piece off of his helmet, damaging it, so Prometheus had to break into the Justice League base to steal his backup helmet from the trophy room in order to fight Batman. Anticipating this, Batman hacked the backup helmet and waited for Prometheus to put it on and get overconfident, at which point Batman downloaded the physical skills of Professor Stephen Hawking into Prometheus' nervous system and then punched him in the face.

Batman and the Huntress discussed this for a minute while the defeated Prometheus lay on the floor:

Did Batman cheat? Or did Batman consider the problem and implement the best possible solution without worrying about whether it was fair?

I'm going to go with Batman's answer to that one, and not just because I like him. However, I am going to consider yet another alternative response, which is that maybe in the long run cheating at the Murder Game makes us all better people. It's like in the movie Bring It On, a compelling drama about cheerleading, teamwork, and a little bit of cheating. See, the captain of the award-winning Rancho Carne Toros, a somewhat abrasive girl who "puts the whore in horrible" known as Big Red, had for years been driving out to East Compton to videotape the cheerleading routines of the East Compton Clovers and then pass them off as the Toros' own, winning them a number of national championships. When the Toros' deception is revealed by surly new girl Missy, who is either bank or bank-rupt depending on which Toro you ask, they end up working twice as hard, banding together, and learning about what's really important.

Cheating, although morally wrong, actually helps them to grow and become better people, and really, isn't that what everyone wants? To become a better person? I know that's all I really wanted, which was to become a better person.

And also to win the Murder Game. Which I did.

All Around the Town

2011-06-11T16:51:00.002-05:00

I haven't really been happy with any of the pictures I've taken for over a month now, and I'm not sure why. There's some decent shots in there, but nothing really pops out to me and makes me feel like I really nailed something. I'd say that I need to get out of town, and see something new, but I'm pretty sure that almost all of these are things and places that I've never photographed before, or at least not for a few months or years. I've played with color, played with black and white, tried to shoot outside my normal box, and nothing feels satisfying.

Maybe I'm just stressed and tired. Who knows?

At any rate, here's a random selection of photographs of Knoxville. I hope you like at least some of them.

OK, I lied a little. I actually do like this one:

I don't usually take pictures of people, but I think I really caught Kristin there.

Back to photographs that leave me vaguely dissatisfied, like this one of a fireman rescuing a zombie baby:

and these:

I like this one as well:

I pulled the car over on the side of the road to take it today, when I saw that I was driving past the paddleboat. Then I took these while I was out:

Like I said, they're not terrible pictures. My finger isn't over the lens and they're not blurry, but they're not really doing anything for me, and they're the best ones out of about a hundred rejects.

Maybe I'm just in a funk.

Staycation Day 5: I Had All These Plans

2011-06-06T17:40:00.002-05:00

I had all these plans for my Staycation. There was a bunch of stuff I wanted to do because I'm not really going to have another vacation until November, when I go home for Thanksgiving break. I was going to go on photo walks, I was planning to visit two different museums, I thought about hiking, I was going to go to the roller derby championship, and instead I went to lunch twice, went to a movie, and went to McKay's twice to turn in books and finally get rid of the VHS tapes taking up space in my apartment that I don't even have a player for.

So what happened?

Well, like I said on Day 1, it is swelteringly hot. It's too hot to walk around outside taking pictures, or to go hiking. I probably should have checked the weather before I scheduled time off, but I've been wanting time off since March or so, and I just went for it.

The other reason my plans fell apart after a day or two of a five day staycation goes back to what my friend Rod phrased as "the freedom of utter slothfullness". Once I got settled in, I didn't want to go anywhere, and I ended up not leaving my apartment from Friday night until Sunday night, when I ran out of milk. I tried to sleep in (unsuccessfully; my body apparently no longer believes in sleeping past nine), read a book, watched some movies, played video games, and basically did nothing.

And it was wonderful.

On the other hand, this bodes poorly for my later years when I am old and retired, as it now seems 99 percent likely that I will become a shut-in and start hoarding cats and dressing them in little outfits:

Should I just start sewing the outfits now, or give it a few more years?

Staycation Day 2: 2 Fast and 2 Furious in the Love Garage

2011-06-04T07:39:00.002-05:00

Yesterday afternoon I decided to go to the mall to take in a matinee-priced showing of "X-Men: First Class". That third X-Men movie was abominable, but the Wolverine one was sort of tolerable, so I went in with low expectations which were handsomely rewarded. The only real problem I had with the whole experience, other than sitting through the credits for a bonus scene that never came after drinking a "medium" Diet Coke the size of a newborn baby and having to pee so bad that I thought I might rupture, was in finding a decent parking space.

There were lots of spaces outside, given that no one but the elderly and the unemployed are at the mall on a Friday afternoon (or, I guess, people on vacation), but after yesterday's experience with the sun I didn't know if I really wanted to leave my car outside to melt in the heat. Given the choice between parking outside and parking in the Love Garage, though, I decided to just risk the sun rather than risk getting run over or accidentally catching an STD just by walking through the aisles.

I don't know for sure if the Love Garage really has a name, but I refer to it as that after the bizarre experience that Kristin and I had leaving "Thor" a few weeks ago. We were running a little late to see the movie, although you have to realize that my concept of "a little late" and Kristin's are two wildly different things, and Kristin came to pick me up maybe seven minutes later than agreed on, which she thought was practically on time. I was already having a bad day, so the seven minutes threw me into high-maintenance meltdown ("We had a schedule! What if I don't have time to buy candy now? What if we get bad seats because we're not twenty minutes early?") and Kristin tried to manage it by suggesting that we park in the garage, where we could walk right into the theater.

"I've never parked in the garage before," I blurted, momentarily short-circuited. I didn't know how I should feel about this. Do I like the garage? Would it give us more time to buy candy? Or would it take us even longer now and make us have to sit in the very front and tilt our heads way way up toward the screen until our necks hurt?

"Neither have I, but, you know, we'll be fine," Kristin said, and it seemed like we were fine, until the movie was over and we tried to leave.

The first indication of trouble was the loud revving of several engines and the squealing of tires on the level above us. Kristin and I both looked at the ceiling several times as we made our way back to the car, sticking to the sides of the aisle in case one of the cars came whipping around the corner and tried to run us over.

"I think they're drag racing on the roof."

"Jesus. It sounds like 'Tokyo Drift' up there. What the hell?"

Vroooooom! Squeal!

"They really are! Oh my God!"

"Let's just get out of here."

Easier said than done. When we got to the car, Kristin was digging in her huge purse for the car keys, and I noticed some... "action"... on the trunk of the car across from us.

And by "action" I mean a high school girl with her legs wrapped around the waist of a high school boy in the throes of heavy duty fully clothed grinding.

"Look. Over. There," I Cameron Fry-ed to Kristin.

"I'll find the keys in a second! Stop ye-- Holy shit."

"Don't stare! Are they, like, actually doing it?"

"They're damn close." Vroooom! Screeeeeeeeeeech! "Let's get out of here before that girl ends up pregnant."

"Seriously. It's like ten different movies at one time."

And then on the way out, we accidentally drove into Cougartown. Somewhere on the third level we spun around the corner and the headlights washed over another couple making out against the walls and they pulled apart in surprise and she was over 40 and he didn't look old enough to drive after dark and VROOOOM! SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAL!

I'm convinced that we barely escaped with our lives, so yesterday I parked outside in the sunbaked parking lot.

Then I went home and made Ten Minute Pea Soup for dinner. According to the recipe, it was light and summery, and it looked super-easy. I needed:

2 tablespoons of butter
1 clove of garlic, minced
8 cups of frozen peas
5 cups of chicken stock
salt and pepper to taste

The recipe said to gently melt the butter in the pot:

I assumed this meant to use really low heat, so that the butter melts but doesn't burn or brown. It would have happened faster if I cut up the butter a little first, but that never occurs to me until after I've dumped butter into a hot pan and it's too late.

After melting the butter, I was advised to gently fry the garlic in it until translucent:

and then to add the frozen peas for two minutes:

I guess this was to partially defrost them?

Let me add that you do not want to spill frozen peas across your counter while measuring out eight cups of them. It's like a bag of tiny frozen marbles, and much cursing will follow.

After two minutes of stirring the peas, I added five cups of chicken stock and brought it to a boil:

then reduced the heat to a simmer, covered it, and ignored it for six minutes. After that I was supposed to put it in the blender, but didn't feel motivated to slowly spoon eight cups of peas into the blender, so I used the immersion blender instead after salting and peppering:

Then I topped it with a sprinkle of parmesan, since I had no croutons and didn't want to make any:

It didn't really taste like garlic, just like a lot of peas, but it only took a couple minutes longer than opening a can of soup and heating it, and isn't homemade always better?

I saw that in a movie, but not any of the movies that I saw in the garage.

Staycation Day 1: Gummi Candy Finger Puppets

2011-06-02T22:14:00.003-05:00

I'm on vacation for a few days, but it's more of a staycation since I'm not planning to leave town. As it is, I might not even leave my house, because when I did today to go to a lunch meeting at work (which Kristin and Richie offered to reschedule, but I declined), pick up a book my friend Donna put on reserve for me at the library, and stop at McKay's to trade in some books, this happened:

108 degrees? I realize the car was parked in the sun, but still, 108 degrees?

It is officially too hot to leave the house for the rest of the day.

Just because I stayed in, though, doesn't mean I didn't find something fun to do, besides reading, cleaning the bathroom, making hummus, and playing video games. I've been saving something special for a rainy day, but a scorchingly hot day when you can't go outside without drying out like a piece of jerky totally counts, too. My home confinement meant that it was time to amuse myself with something truly special:

Gummi candy finger puppets.

Unlike the gummi hot dog, which sort of vaguely looked like a hot dog but could have also been a gummi internal organ, the gummi candy finger puppets are shockingly detailed and true to the original Marvel Comics source material. They're not perfect, but they are clearly recognizable as your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man:

reformed alcoholic Iron Man:

the jade giant, the emerald berserker known as the Incredible Hulk:

and the man who's the best he is at what he does, and what he does isn't pretty:

Wolverine, an amnesiac hairy hundred year old five foot tall Canadian who is somehow the epitome of "cool" in the Marvel Universe. Of course, Wolverine will be finding it a little bit more difficult than usual to claw things since I ate his arms:

But sometimes that's just how these things go.

Biscuits and Babies

2011-05-29T07:58:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was a bad day for Kristin, in which we (mostly me, but also Jeannie) subjected her to a string of indignities and then took pictures.

Indignity #1: I made Kristin wake up really, really early on a Saturday, advising her that I would be at her building at 8 AM so that we could leave for the International Biscuit Festival and be there by 9 AM. It was so early that the staff at her desk were asking each other why she was awake, and I had to explain that I told her 8 AM because I really planned to leave by 9 AM and knew that she wouldn't be ready on time. Sure enough, we left at ten after nine, even though I was there at eight.

She probably would have just bailed on the whole thing, but on Tuesday night I publically accused her of repeatedly ditching me for weekend plans unless we were doing something that she wanted to do, so Kristin was up bright and early yesterday, just to prove me wrong.

I should be a psychologist.

Or a manipulative sociopath.

Kristin got her own jab in, though, by tricking me into agreeing that it would somehow be better if we walked downtown instead of riding in an air-conditioned car like normal people do. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but several minutes later, there we were on Biscuit Boulevard, a temporary street set up alongside Market Square:

We were a half hour early for the biscuit tasting, which gave us time to get our tasting tickets:

(Yee Haw Industries did a really nice job on those and on the festival posters) and scope out the booths before the crowds came. It also gave us time to notice that the International Biscuit Festival is, unfortunately, not an International Spelling Festival:

Some competitors did sweet biscuits, like the UT Culinary Institute's orange glazed vanilla biscuit:

which was good, but not as good as Sapphire's Orange Julius biscuit:

Tea at the Gallery also did a sweet biscuit, a cinnamon scone with creme and raspberry preserves and lemon curd:

and I almost voted for it.

There were also savory biscuits, like (I think) this one:

from the Abundant Life Kitchen:

I think it was savory because we never got to actually taste one, due to Indignity #2: Crowds. Huge crowds pressing and rubbing against you as they fight for biscuit samples in a confined space.

Once the tasting portion of Biscuit Fest started, a few thousand people crowded onto Biscuit Boulevard, which was only a block long. We could barely move, much less reach any tables for a sample, and we ended up squeezing between two booths and escaping the area by sneaking along behind them. On the way, I snagged a blueberry sage biscuit with jalapeno honey from Latitude 35's table, and decided that it was decent but overcomplicated, so I didn't vote for them, either.

Freed from the mass of biscuit-seekers, Kristin and I decided to get some breakfast and go back to the tasting after the crowd had thinned a little. We ate at the Bistro at the Bijou, where Kristin had a fried egg sandwich and I had french toast made with french bread, which cracked me up because all I could think of was the scene in Better Off Dead when Lane's mom makes a french dinner and proudly announces the menu of french bread, french fries, and french dressing.

After breakfast, we went back to Biscuit Boulevard, discovered that the crowds had thinned (and at least one vendor had run out of biscuits and closed), and finished our tasting:

Both of us ended up voting for the cheese and chive biscuit from Callie's Charleston Biscuits and Pimento Cheese, which was so good that I ate mine and then ate Kristin's too.

Full of biscuits (I was more full than Kristin, because she only took one bite of each biscuit and then gave the rest to me) and breakfast, we then walked to the hospital to see Jeannie, who had a baby on Friday.

Then, Indignity #3: We made Kristin touch a human baby.

And we took pictures of her doing it.

It turned out to be a pretty good day for me, but I can't say the same for Kristin.

The Severed Head of Victor Ashe

2011-05-16T19:13:00.003-05:00

For as much as I talk about art and how much I believe in it and how evil the city art task force is, I do have to say that some art just isn't for everybody.

For example, I think the sculpture in the middle of the pedestrian walkway on campus is ugly:

I'm not alone. The students protested loudly when it was installed, and the school eventually had to install security cameras due to damage done by vandals. They don't have cameras for the fish with legs:

or the Torchbearer:

or the naked girl riding a bull that I don't seem to have a photograph of, but they have them to watch that fugly pile of aluminum and plastic. And yes, I realize that there is technique and symbolism and all sorts of hard work and careful thought that went into that sculpture, but no amount of education or art appreciation will make me think that thing doesn't look like the sad playground at a run-down McDonald's.

Anyway, the whole reason I was thinking about ugly art, or, more charitably, art gone wrong, was the sculpture that I saw this weekend at Victor Ashe Park. Elizabeth and I met Kay there very early on Saturday morning to volunteer for the Great Strides Walk to end cystic fibrosis. We had a lot of fun handing out t-shirts all morning, and everyone else seemed to enjoy it, too.

They had face painting, a clown making balloon animals:

food and drinks:

a silent auction:

and the whole thing was presided over by a creepy severed bronze head on a pike.

Yeah, you heard me.

This has to be the most horribly misguided memorial sculpture I've ever seen:

unless Victor Ashe had some sort of skin condition, or decapitation problem, or tragic skull crushing accident:

in which case I will apologize profusely.

As it is, though, I think that thing is creepy and weird and kind of unattractive.

Cortland, NY, Spring 1997

2011-05-13T17:26:00.002-05:00

A week or so ago a few of us were discussing the prom, on Facebook, and Justin wondered if any of us still had any photos from our prom. I knew that I did somewhere, so I went digging through the closet in my storage bedroom for photo albums, and managed to locate a number of prom pictures. While I was looking, I located a number of other interesting photographs, and was struck by this set of black and white pictures.

I don't really have any context for them, but their placement in the albums suggests that I took them during the spring of my senior year of college. I was taking a lot of solitary walks around town at that point, brooding and being depressed, and I took a lot of pictures. Every once in a while I would buy a roll of black and white film instead of color, and what struck me about this set is how much they look like the pictures I still take today. I guess my aesthetic hasn't really changed, even if the camera has.

Here's what I scanned in:

I feel like this might have been on Otter Creek, but I'm not certain. I know it was on the back side of campus, near the Waterworks.

I have a vague idea that the darker colors of this house were green, and the lighter colors yellow. It was somewhere between campus and Main Street, I believe on the street where Spanky's (a bar that made delicious homemade lemonade spiked with vodka and served in mason jars) was.

Main Street in Cortland was a one-way street at the time. You had to circle around on side streets to get to the right end.

I think this woman was dancing. I remember seeing her downtown a lot, dancing on the sidewalks. Now that I think about it, she may have been mentally ill, but at the time I just thought she was a typical weird townie.

I ate pizza on the first floor of this building many, many times. The disco ball on top of my refrigerator is from a bar/club that was a few storefronts down from there, and I went there a lot as a student for a while. I read online that this building has since burned down, and I have no idea if it's been reconstructed.

This is taken from the sidewalk in front of Hayes Hall, where I was later a hall director. The building in the foreground is Randall Hall, where I was a resident assistant my senior year, and the taller building is Clark Hall, where I stayed for my freshman year orientation.

There's Randall and Clark again, and on the right is Alger Hall, where I lived as a freshman, stayed a couple of summers as an orientation assistant, and later was a hall director.

I might still scan in those prom pictures, at some point, but for now I think we've been down the memory hole enough for a little while.

Spicy Cauliflower Soup

2011-05-10T18:07:00.003-05:00

Back when I bought Countess LuAnn of New York's mildly hypocritical book of hilarious etiquette, I also picked up this soup cookbook for eight dollars. While I was flipping through it, I spotted at least four recipes that I wanted to try, and now that I've had time to page through it a few times it's full of bookmarks for things that I want to try out. Another plus is that many of the soups call for less than five ingredients, which implies that they are hard to screw up.

Case in point: Tonight I made Curried Cauliflower Soup, which only had three main ingredients but was kind of an adventure to me because I've never prepared a cauliflower.

Shut up.

Lots of people hate vegetables.

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I was a very stubborn child, and my parents eventually gave up on trying to force new foods on me. I brought my lunch to school every day from kindergarten until graduation, and the sandwich was either peanut butter and grape jelly ("No strawberry! Only grape!") or American cheese ("Only the orange kind!") and mayo (on this point my brother was the problematic one; I will eat mayo, light mayo, Miracle Whip, Miracle Whip light, store brand, etc. but while living at home he would only eat Miracle Whip, and only the regular kind, not the diet kind). I did not eat pizza with sauce on it until I was in college, and did not eat a salad until I was in graduate school because I would not eat lettuce.

So, anyway, lots of things are still new experiences to me, and the attraction of trying cauliflower via this particular recipe was that the soup is pureed at the end. Like a baby, I respond better to new foods when they are pasted into mush. I've had cauliflower mixed in with another pureed soup, but this was the first time by itself.

According to the recipe, I needed:

1 large cauliflower
3 cups milk
1 tablespoon garam masala
salt and pepper to taste

Most of this was pretty easy to locate. I know where to find milk, and I already have salt and pepper. I've seen cauliflower in the produce department, so that wasn't really a challenge:

I wasn't sure how big a "large" cauliflower should be (or, for that matter, if you just call it a cauliflower; is it a head of cauliflower? a growth? a cluster?) so I took the biggest one in the case.

Then I tried to find garam masala. I looked online before going to the store, and discovered that garam masala is a blend of spices, so I went to look in the spice aisle, with no luck. Then I went to look in the International aisle, because my friend Liz said that it's often used in Indian cooking, but had no luck there, either. Eventually, I asked a Kroger employee, but the look they gave me suggested that I might as well have asked for a platter of unicorn steaks marinated in fairy dust.

"Garam... masala?"

"It's a spice. I looked online. McCormick makes it."

"Did you check... at... McCormick's?"

"McCormick is a company, not a store. They make spices."

"You should check the spice aisle."

I should also refrain from beating you with my tumor of cauliflower, since you're sort of trying to help.

Fortunately, I was right in suspecting that they might have it at Earthfare. Even more fortunately, I ran into my friend Jennifer, who is a trained chef, there and she knew exactly where it was. In case I wanted other Indian spices, she also pointed me toward what she's pretty sure is the only Indian market in town. I'm pretty sure she's right, since I've never noticed one anywhere else.

Armed with my spices, I went home, and got to work. First, the recipe advised me to cut the cauliflower into florets. I know what a broccoli floret looks like, so this seemed easy enough:

Then I put all the ingredients in a pot and waited for the milk to come to a boil. Right before it did, I decided that the florets were too big:

so I cut them into smaller pieces while they were still in the pot and the milk was starting to boil. This is probably about as smart as ironing your shirt while wearing it, but I managed not to scald myself. After the milk boiled, I lowered the heat, covered the pot, and left it to simmer for 18 to 20 minutes:

and then dumped the whole thing into the blender:

and pureed it into delicious, if colorless, soup:

The garam masala gives it a really nice smell, but that's also mostly all I tasted, so I guess cauliflower is kind of bland? Maybe subtly flavored and easily overwhelmed? Either way, I really liked the soup, and it was so easy that even I couldn't screw it up.

Where Dinosaurs Came From

2011-05-05T20:03:00.004-05:00

A friend and I got into a minor squabble today about evolution, because we were talking about the recent passage of House Bill 368 here in Tennessee. It hasn't passed the senate or been signed by the governor, so it's not a law yet, but if it becomes one then the general interpretation of it is that teachers can feel free to teach intelligent design as a facet of the "scientific controversy" over evolution. My friend and I disagree over whether there is any controversy, since I believe in science, and evolution is science. My friend believes in intelligent design, and claims that it is also science.

I disagree.

To me, intelligent design is just creationism in a pseudoscientific package. Once you start trying to define the "intelligence" behind intelligent design, it starts sounding an awful lot like God, and God and science don't exactly go hand in hand. My friend disagrees, and then went on to say that, "Evolution is just a theory, anyway. Why not teach more than one theory?"

Rather than argue that my friend validates the theory of evolution every year by insisting on a new flu shot, I've decided instead that they're right: why not teach more than one theory? My friend Justin, who is pretty smart (I used to be smart, but I spent my twenties drowning my intellect in fried cheese and fruity drinks in gigantic glasses; now I'm sometimes confused by mirrors and often think that prime numbers have something to do with cuts of beef), explained this once by pointing out that in the same way that you should not bake muffins in gym class you should not discuss religion in science class because they have nothing to do with each other. I tend to agree, but where's the fun in that?

Instead, I want Tennessee to fully embrace this law by teaching multiple theories of evolution and the origin of life. I want the Darwinian model, of course, but would also like for them to cover intelligent design, spontaneous generation, Prometheus fashioning men from clay, twin brother hero-gods crafting the first men from maize and chili peppers, the Flying Spaghetti Monster touching Earth with his Noodly Appendage, the Great Egg splitting open and spilling forth All That Is Known, Earth-Woman falling from the sky to land on the back of a giant turtle, and Adventure Comics #333:

Our story opens with Superboy visiting his friends, the Legion of Superheroes, in their native time period of 30th Century Earth. There aren't any Sun Eaters or sentient buildings that need attention, so the Legion is working on an archeology project when they make a shocking discovery:

A strange metal tablet, you say? Let's check it out, with some science!

Radio carbon dating is real, adding further validity to this story. Anyway, the team decides to use their time bubbles to investigate this mysterious war between Krypton and Earth, so half of them go to ancient Krypton while the other half goes to ancient Earth.

Team Krypton runs into a little trouble, in that Krypton is a primitive planet with no scientists around, which makes it a little difficult to commit interstellar war. Saturn Girl may have a solution, though:

Superboy, by the way, is a total dick here.

"That's impossible, but even though you're probably wrong we'll go ahead and check out your lead, anyway."

At least he doesn't add that they're just humoring her because she's a girl. It wouldn't be at all surprising, given how rough women had it in Silver Age comics, but instead Superboy's reasons for being a dick in this particular case go unspoken. So does his apology for doubting her when they actually do run into a scientist:

It turns out that Krypton hates scientists because they accidentally obliterated a city through a nuclear accident, so the government banned all science in response, adhering to their campaign slogan of "Babies Shouldn't Be In Bathwater, Anyway!" The scientists are slowly constructing a space ark, so that they can go colonize prehistoric Earth, so the Legion decides to help:

Wait, did he just say they were bringing giant lizards?

Yeah, he did.

Meanwhile, back on prehistoric Earth, Brainiac 5's team makes a shocking discovery:

They found Atlantis:

They also found Leta Lal, complaining about the air quality.

Now, for those who don't know Silver Age comics, this girl might as well have a sign over her head that says "love interest", because you just know Superboy is going to fall for her. Superboy, and later Superman, continuously and consistently falls for the LL combo: Lana Lang, Lois Lane, Lori Lemaris, Luma Lynai, Lyla Lerrol, Lola-La, Lex Luthor... wait, that last one only happened in my imagination while I was watching "Smallville". Anyway, sure enough, the minute they set eyes on each other, sparks fly:

Unfortunately, Saturn Girl and Brainiac 5 immediately start bickering:

Two important things about that panel:

1) Superboy looks so irritated. "Guys, I'm trying to, you know, hit on this prehistoric alien chick over here. Could you keep it down?" Given that this is a Silver Age comic, they're lucky he didn't turn them into hags or force them both to marry Jimmy Olson just to teach them a lesson.

2) The Legion just started the war that they came back in time to investigate. By the end of the story, one of them will probably end up being their own grandfather.

There are several pages of fighting as the Kryptonian scientists battle the Vruunian colonists, aided by the Legionnaire instigators who, instead of being heroic, instead allow the hostilities to escalate to the point that the Kryptonians, who have been shunned on their own world for unleashing nuclear armageddon, decide that the best course of action is to unleash nuclear armageddon:

Saturn Girl, recognizing that the Kryptonian missle launch behind her is more important than the Kryptonian missle that Superboy's trying to launch over in Atlantis with Leta Lal, heads off disaster, and then Brainiac 5 makes a shocking discovery:

and suggests an even more shocking solution:

So, to sum things up, the Legion brings dinosaurs to Earth, starts a war, helps a bunch of people kill each other, stops the war that wouldn't have happened in the first place, and then invents Atlantis. As for those Kryptonian scientists, well:

It turns out that they got Jurassic Park-ed by their allegedly tame helper lizards.

So, what's the moral of the story?

Who cares? Morality has no place in high school Biology, where I'm going to lobby my local school board to be sure that "Adventure Comics" #333 is taught.

Policy Debate

2011-05-01T09:59:00.004-05:00

I don't have anything against Senator Campfield, the current state senator and former state representative for my district. I don't agree with his positions or his ideas on LGBT issues, though, which is why I felt the need to email him recently about SB49, the "Don't Say Gay" bill that comes up for a vote on May 5. Senator Campfield tried to pass this bill a number of times as a representative, and now that he's a senator he's trying to pass it again. As a constituent who disagrees with the idea behind the bill, I decided to express my thoughts.

Our email exchange is below. I haven't added or removed anything.

Senator Campfield,

Given that you are sponsoring this bill, I can already guess at how you intend to vote on it, but as a constituent living in your district I did want to say that I disagree.

You've offered no solid, documented examples of homosexuality being taught at any time in any school, anywhere in the state. Additionally, no school district has stated that they intend to add that content to their elementary and middle school lesson plans, so there seems to be no need for this bill.

The (hopefully) unintended consequences of it, on the other hand, could prove very damaging. Children of same gender parents would be unable to discuss their families in school, sending a message to them that their family is somehow shameful. In a time when LGBT teen suicides are receiving national attention, with some of the victims as young as 11 years old (Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover in April 2009), your bill would prevent students struggling with those issues from seeking counseling or resources at school. If they are also not receiving support at home, where are they supposed to turn?

When you were running for your current office, I received a large volume of campaign mail which described you as a fan of small government and a person who would focus on job creation. This bill doesn't seem to have anything to do with either of those concepts.

Please take the time to consider the damage that you are about to inflict on children who are already struggling with their identities and self worth, and withdraw your sponsorship from this bill.

While I appreciate your passion, I still feel it is a parents responsibility to decide when a child is ready to grasp such a complex issue as sexuality and what they want to tell the child about that complex subject.

All children develop mentally at different rates. I do not feel a teacher with an agenda (Be it pro or con) is the appropriate person to decide "Now is the time" for an entire class just because they may think one way or another on an issue and want to espouse it. I doubt you would want a teacher who said "Homosexuality is evil, dirty and wrong" just because they felt it was appropriate and that is what they thought the children needed and were ready to hear.

We are falling behind the rest of the world in math, science, and English amongst other things. This will be just one less issue teachers have to worry about teaching as part of their curricula.

Yours in service, Sen. Stacey Campfield

Senator Campfield,

I appreciate your taking the time to respond, but your response still leaves me with questions.

If the responsibility of helping children to grasp issues of sexuality lies with the parents, then why doesn't your bill prevent the teaching of any kind of sexuality? Shouldn't any mention of heterosexuality also be restricted in the classroom, then?

And if you're worried about the math, science, and English curricula, (which, based on national testing statistics, I agree that Tennessee should be worried about), then why doesn't your bill focus on better techniques and strategies for teaching math, science, and English? It's not as if any school district anywhere in the state is neglecting to teach those in favor of a curriculum about homosexuality instead. By putting the focus on homosexuality, you're actually clouding the issue, and giving people the idea that it's your main concern, rather than math, science, and English. Why not put the focus where it should be?

While there is a scientific need to mention the basics of heterosexuality when teaching the basics of reproduction (XY chromosomes, etc.) there is no scientific need to mention homosexuality as homosexuals do not naturally reproduce.

Neither do infertile heterosexual couples, but you don't currently sponsor any bills banning the teaching of subject matter dealing with adoption or in-vitro fertilization. Besides, if you're making scientific evidence the basis of what is and is not included in the science curriculum, then you're asking schools to overlook the fact that homosexual behavior has been documented in over 500 species. How is the science curriculum improved by censoring scientific evidence?

It is not clear as to its scientific significance.

That's true, but isn't part of the purpose of schooling to teach students critical thinking skills that will enable them to help determine whether it's scientifically significant? By curtailing discussion, your bill prevents them from reaching a conclusion. Is that the way we should treat all unknowns in science? If so, you'll need to write several dozen more bills.

Regardless, you still haven't addressed my original point about unintended consequences of your bill. Will it prevent students from seeking counseling and teachers from making referrals to appropriate resources dealing with LGBT topics? And if so, do you intend to add any amendments before the bill comes up for a vote to insure that the ability of teachers and guidance counselors to help students struggling with LGBT issues is not impeded?

I sent that last one a few hours ago, and so far he hasn't written back. Given that he spent the entirety of the exchange ignoring most of my points, I don't really expect him to, but if he does I'll update this. For now I'm going to get moving on the rest of my day, and hope that people in the rest of the state are contacting senators for their districts, who might actually listen.

Edited to add: Senator Campfield replied to my last message today.

After minds are developed enough for it yes.

I don't even know how to respond to that. I asked four questions in my last email to him, and got only that one sentence in response. I'm not even sure which question that answers.