Monday various

  • Need a little extra bees and honey in your sky rocket? Cockney rhyming slang to be added as an option to some East London ATMs. Silly merchant bankers!
  • An interesting article on the new graphic novel version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, although I’m not so sure about the whole “comic books are the anti-book” sentiment that seems to be running through it. [via]
  • It may be time for me to revisit Bradbury’s original novel, especially in light of the man’s own sometimes puzzling pronouncements about it in recent years. I love Ray Bradbury maybe more than any other writer, and it’s possible he’s earned his curmudgeonly ways, but it can be a lot easier to love the words than the man.

  • Still, the man’s an absolute darling compared to, say, Lord of the Flies author William Golding [via]
  • Dear Tom Ridge: too damn little, too damn late. I didn’t even like you all that much when you were my governor.
  • And finally, John Scalzi has been getting some flack in certain circles for his write-up of design flaws in the Star Wars universe, but the man isn’t wrong. (Even the six-year-old me, who can’t help but pester, “Well, maybe the Sarlaac isn’t native to Tatooine,” has to accept that.)

“Future events such as these will affect you in the future.”

Last night, three fellow cappers and I went to see Rifftrax Live in Union Square, allegedly the first theater in the nation that sold out for their simulcast riffing of Plan 9 from Outer Space. I’d never seen the movie in its entirety before — just bits and pieces, and then a big block of it earlier this week when I discovered Netflix had it online — so it was a blast seeing it on a big screen in a crowded theater. It’s such an endearingly awful movie, obviously made with a huge amount of love and excitement by Ed Wood, if not even the tiniest shred of talent or ability. For a movie that is so terrible — “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” — it really doesn’t drag at all, and I think it could be genuinely entertaining even without three really funny guys making fun of it on the side.

But Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett did a great job, first with a really terrific short — “Sorry, Fort Worth!” — and then the feature, really bringing their A material, a script you can tell they’ve been honing for awhile. It was also great to see and hear Jonathan Coulton do a couple of songs (and help out with another), and you definitely got the sense that some people were going to go home after the show and look him and his music up.

Speaking of going home, I didn’t make it there until sometime after midnight, just missing the first subway uptown from Union Square — no Metro card, and long lines at malfunctioning machines — and then having to wait around Penn Station for half an hour until my train showed up. It gave me time to chat with some of the station’s late-night drunks and transients, particularly the one gentleman who, instead of just asking me for some money, wanted to give me a story about how he’d just gotten out of prison for…well, something cocaine-related, though it wasn’t entirely clear what. I was happy to give him a dollar, especially if it meant he’d wander off and bother someone else. He had the unmistakable scent of alcohol on him, plus the look of a man whose good humor and gregariousness could turn to violence, so I just wanted to escape with my book to another (more crowded) section of the station. He, of course, wanted to fist-bump me in thanks for the dollar and to ask me about the book. When I told him it was a book about gardening, I don’t think he approved. But at least that seemed to end the conversation, and he walked off to the Amtrak station upstairs.

Those few moments of weirdness — plus the disgusting heat in Manhattan, especially in the subway — notwithstanding, I had a great evening, and I’m definitely glad I went.

I scream, you scream

In the fall of 2003, the Penn State Creamery announced that it would debut a new ice cream the following summer, “as part of a yearlong series of events and celebrations commemorating Penn State’s establishment in 1855.” I left Pennsylvania in July of 2004, the very month the new flavor was to be announced, so I never did find out what it was, nor how the new flavor was received by the hungry masses.

However, I recently learned that some librarians are petitioning for their own ice cream flavor from Ben & Jerry’s. (Or at least, somebody’s started a Facebook group around that idea.) And, in the rush to make up silly names for it like “the Dewey Caramel System,” it occured to me that the Penn State Monty Python Society had once spent way too much time thinking up silly ice cream flavor names of its own. Then this afternoon at work, we had an “ice cream social” — one of those office events they trot out now and then to force people to mingle with coworkers — and so I thought I’d look through the list the Society came up with six years ago and maybe post them here.

In 2003, I printed nearly 100 of the best names in the club’s weekly newsletter — which I edited as a labor of deranged love for several years — but in retrospect most of the names aren’t very funny. Like a lot of the newsletter’s content, in retrospect it’s mostly just filler. Some of the suggested flavors were local inside jokes — like CATA Bus Crunch, Sproul Hall Elevator, Nittany Nutz, and We Don’t Know the Goddamn Flavor — and some were just vaguely college-related — like Freshman 15, Student ID Number, Tüition Increase, and Condom Co-op Mint. Some were even more specific to the club — like Free the Hole, FROH, or Wimpy (“it’s gerbilrific!”) — while others just defy understanding half a decade later — like Skrinchie, OMG!!!!!1!!!1!!one!B-P, or Contains No Potatoes. (That said, I would totally order a scoop of Contains No Potatoes, if just to try it.) Most of the rest are just juvenile and/or sex-related — like Syphilicious! and Delicious Wang. And those are the best of them.

In fact, looking over the list now, there’s only a few I find genuinely amusing, like No Means Nougat!, or Soylent Cream (“Good people, good ice cream!”), or even the bizarre Explode! (“the Russian Roulette of ice cream: every 15 cones has a bomb!”) There were some nice meta ones, like The Creamery is Now Closed, or simply Ice Cream. And there’s a weird over-abundance of umlauts — which actually makes me nostalgic for a time when I got to hang out with people who were way too amused by umlauts every week.

But I think my personal favorite — in a list to which I’m no longer entirely sure how I directly contributed, and which nowadays just strikes me as kind of dumb — is the no-doubt sinfully delicious You Can Take Our Ice Cream, But You’ll Never Take Our Freedom.

Okay, that or Squirrel Nuts. It’s kind of a toss-up.

Fixer-upper

If you’ve been following me at all via Twitter (or just following the feed from Twitter in the sidebar), you may know that my parents are remodeling the house. Carpeting in the downstairs hallway and living room, as well as on stairs and on the upstairs landing, has all been pulled up, and the wood paneling that was here when they bought the house (a year or two before I was born) has been removed. New stairs have been put in, and tile and wood floors have been put down in the downstairs and upstairs hallways, respectively. With new carpeting (for the living room) and painting (all over), we’re still probably looking at another couple of weeks at least — although maybe not back-to-back — but it does seem to be coming along. By and large I’ve missed out on the actual construction, seeing work crews arrive before I leave or, on a couple of occasions, being trapped downstairs or outside after work because they hadn’t yet finished when I got home. I’ve mostly seen their handiwork after the fact, and it’s been a little weird to come home from work every day with a new part of the house I grew up in either missing or changed. But it’s been more weird than inconvenient.

That, of course, was before one of the guys arrived this morning, unannounced, at around 7 am. My father, who let him in and start working, said he was probably here earlier, waiting outside in his car. My father would have let him in earlier, if he had known that, so it’s just as well he didn’t. Being woken up at 7 am to hammering and spackling and doors opening was annoying enough. I swear, there was a moment when I wondered if I’d made a mistake and it wasn’t actually Saturday. But even on weekdays, they don’t usually arrive until 8. I appreciate the guy’s enthusiasm for his work and desire to get it done as soon as possible, but when your construction site’s in an occupied house, maybe you should call ahead instead of dropping by when everybody else in the world is still asleep.

Happy thoughts (4)

Some things that made me happy this weekend, in no particular order:

  • The stunning weather. It’s since grown a little colder, but we had beautiful spring weather all weekend long.
  • Dinner and good conversation with friends on Saturday night. I got a fortune cookie fortune that said, “You look pretty.” And the restaurant was very kind to recalculate our bill when we asked to pay separately.
  • I mailed out 50+ packages, with some 80-90 copies of Kaleidotrope. Easily one the more time consuming and least fun parts of running the zine, it was made a lot easier by not having to wait in line at the post office and friendly postal workers. (To be nice, I split the mailings between two local post offices.) There are still reviewer copies to go, but current subscribers and contributors should all be getting their copies soon.
  • The two movies I saw this weekend.
  • My mother is feeling a lot better. Some family came to visit with her on Saturday, and she’s been a lot more up and about recently. Luckily the weather was nice enough for her to go outside briefly over the weekend.

I’m not sure if I’m going to keep doing this meme. On the one hand, I see the benefit of actively looking at the things that make you happy in a given day; I think there’s something to be gained from that kind of introspection. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to devote entire blog posts to it. We’ll see.