capping

Monday various

Geist Summer 2010

Can I just say I’m quite enjoying the summer issue of Geist? Sure, I didn’t even make the shortlist for their postcard story contest, and their crossword puzzle hurts my brain every time, but there’s a lot of intriguing stuff inside the issue, even for a non-Canadian like myself.

Like, for instance, this article about Banff, which I know only from Heather‘s descriptive recountings. In it, Stephen Osborne writes:

Presenters adopted a par­tic­u­lar style when dis­cussing mat­ters of the­ory and tech­nique: voices dropped from con­ver­sa­tional reg­is­ters into flat­tened monot­o­nes, the rate of deliv­ery accel­er­ated and the lan­guage tended to thicken under the weight of too much jar­gon. During one such pre­sen­ta­tion, a vol­un­teer from the book table said to me, you know, none of us under­stand a thing of what these peo­ple are say­ing. I assured her that under­stand­ing was not required in the avant-garde.

The author of Eunoia described a plan to embed or implant a poem en­coded in the lan­guage of recom­bi­nant DNA into the bac­terium Deinococcus radio­du­rans, a name that he pro­nounced fiercely, fre­quently and at daunt­ing speed. He had taught him­self genet­ics, he said, and later he said that he was a self-taught geneti­cist. The bac­terium in ques­tion, which he referred to in the diminutive as radio­durans, is expected to out­last the solar sys­tem, the galaxy and what­ever else there is to out­last, with the result that the poem encoded within its DNA — which, I recall him say­ing, would at some point dur­ing its five-billion-year dura­tion gen­er­ate a new poem, also in the lan­guage of DNA — would be the old­est poem in the universe.

Ah, Friday

First there was work.

Then there was play.

Summer hours are only fun on Fridays, and even then I’m not entirely sure the trade-off is worth it. But there’s definitely something to be said for getting home at two o’clock in the afternoon instead of six or seven o’clock at night.

I’m not sure I used that time too productively. I went and bought milk, and a few other groceries, and I watched this week’s episode of Burn Notice. I very inexpertly trimmed and separated some lamb chops for dinner for me and my mother. (My father had a Boy Scout dinner, welcoming a visiting troop from Westbury (the original one) in England.) I spent an unexpected amount of time cleaning up broken glass when I accidentally knocked a jar of gravy off a shelf in the garage. (I can’t say I’m a fan of the stuff myself, so I wasn’t exactly broken up about it. I just didn’t want our dog to lick up shards of broken glass.)

And that’s about it. Today was a much nicer day than yesterday, still pretty hot but not as oppressively muggy. Word is, this is the hottest July on record in most parts, and I’ll be happy enough to put the humidity behind me.

Now I think a little capping might be in order.

Tuesday various

  • Last Thursday, I posted this image to Capper Blog, and I planned to follow up with the original source article here. Better late than never. The pictures there actually give you a better sense of these so-called infinity pools, and moreover just how high up and close to the edge they are. I think I’d be terrified to swim in one these. [via]
  • Going back even further on things I forgot to follow up on: back in June I posted about a link that was going around, suggesting that every actor reads the same newspaper. Well, Slate followed up on that link and found out the story behind the ubiquitous prop. [via]
  • The world really is a poorer place without Jim Henson, isn’t it? [via]
  • I can’t say I’ll miss Blockbuster all that much, but Matt Zoller Seitz makes a compelling argument that we’ve lost something with the company’s (now almost certain) passing [via]:

    I’m talking about the pre-Internet experience of daily life, which was more immediate, more truly interactive: in a word, real. Bland and aloof as it was, Blockbuster was a part of that — and for certain types of people, it was a big part. There was nothing special about Blockbuster as a business, but special moments did happen there, simply by virtue of the fact that the stores were everywhere, and they stocked a lot of movies, and people who wanted to see movies went there regularly, sometimes alone but more often in the company of relatives or friends. You’d go through the front door and pass the front counter — where an employee was checking in a pile of returned videos (when opened, the boxes went whuck!) and check out the new releases wall (Seventy-five copies of “Hard Target?” Seriously?). Then you’d fan out among the aisles and try your luck.

  • And finally, some video game-related links:

That was my weekend

I got home a little after midnight yesterday, and I was a little too tired to actually post anything here. Of course, I wasn’t so tired that I didn’t get in a little late-night capping or watch half of this week’s episode of Doctor Who. (I fell asleep somewhere in the middle, but that was much more exhaustion than any kind of boredom. It was another good episode, which I finished watching this afternoon. I’m particularly looking forward to next week’s, which looks like Stephen Moffat Crossover Overload.)

Why was I out so late, you may ask? Well, I was in Manhattan, at the Cinematic Titanic show in Times Square. And it was a whole heck of a lot of fun.

Not quite sure what I was going to do about dinner, or if I was going to get a chance to meet up with the friends/fellow cappers I knew were attending, I got an early-ish train into the city, arriving a little before five o’clock. The doors of the Nokia theater weren’t scheduled to open until seven, so I had a little time to kill. I decided to kill some of it by revisiting the High Line, which I first saw back in September. It’s a really nice way to see Manhattan — and will probably be even more so once they finally finish extending it to 34th Street — and I definitely recommend it if you’re visiting the city and the weather’s nice. It was a little overcast and windy last night, but I still had a nice time walking the length of it that’s open, something like eight or nine city blocks.

I walked around a little more, finally ending up a little further uptown in the neighborhood where I work. I skipped the chance to actually walk past my office building, where they were no doubt even then testing the fire alarm. (I kid, although they do seem to do that all the time.) I grabbed a sandwich for dinner near Bryant Park, then walked over to the theater in Times Square, hoping to meet up with the rest of the group. And I did, very briefly, although no sooner had we been ushered into the building than we were separated into our assigned sections. It was a big theater, and eventually became very crowded — they were sold out, Joel Hodgson later said — so I didn’t really get to see anybody I knew for any length of time. I didn’t see them at all on my way out after the show, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The show started a little late, and by 8:30 I’ll admit I was getting a little restless. They finally took to the stage, with some very funny warm-up material that seemed to play into the fact that they’d kept us waiting — “just ten more minutes,” they said about half a dozen times — and then with the movie itself. They were riffing on Danger on Tiki Island (aka Brides of Blood), which for a terrible movie was surprisingly not so bad. I mean, it was genuinely awful, don’t get me wrong, and easily lent itself to the mockery, but…well, maybe it’s just that, as a fan of Mystery Science Theater and its offshoots (like Cinematic Titanic), I’ve seen much worse. Hodgson called the film “actually one of the better Filipino monster movies” and despite its awfulness at almost every level, it was hard not to kind of admire it. The movie was no Plan 9 from Outer Space — which is ineptly made but an absolute delight — and not by a long shot, but…well, it was also no Manos: The Hands of Fate.

The show itself was great fun, and though I didn’t see any of the group I’d come in with on my way out, I was right behind MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. I later confirmed that he was there via Twitter, as was John Hodgman, who I glimpsed across the aisle before the show. (Him I’d seen once before, years ago, at a reading/interview he did with Neil Gaiman. I still remember how Hodgman had trouble proving to security who he was so they would let him in.) I don’t know if any other New York semi-celebrities were in the crowd last night, though, since I opted to head back home rather than stick around to try and get my poster signed.

By comparison, today was pretty boring, though pleasantly so. I worked on the New York Times crossword — not quite finished, though this week’s theme seems a little halfhearted, I have to say — and a little on a short story. I also watched the rest of that Doctor Who episode, and another episode of Slings & Arrows, which is probably my favorite series set at a fictional Canadian Shakespeare festival. I also went for a short walk, then a shorter one with the dog, and wrote this. It’s no live shows on Broadway levels of excitement, but it was a good weekend overall.

Of course, it’s back to the office tomorrow. This three-day weekend was nice, but it was much too short.