Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Sunday, September 28, 2008 Grand Theft Life Child development experts generally agree that if a kid doesn't learn certain skills at certain ages -- speaking, tying shoes, saying "I love you" to get out of trouble -- it's going to be harder for him or her to learn them later on. I'm developing a similar theory, along the lines that if you don't learn how to play Grand Theft Auto III in the early 00s, you'll never get good at it. At least, that's the only explanation I can come up with for how persistently and comprehensively I SUCK at it. I did play it, back in the day, a little bit. LPG brought her PlayStation 2 over and plugged it into our TV and I tooled around in Liberty City a bit, mainly playing missions she had already played. Then, as now, my greatest strength was crashing into moving vehicles. At one point I could drive a van into a Humvee, bounce off it, and reverse into it again before I was finished spinning out. I hasten to assure you that this was only in the environment of the game. But then, as now, my biggest weakness was actually finding my way around town. It was fine when I had LPG at my side, giving me turn-by-turn directions like an even more sarcastic GPS system. I accepted this as part of the learning curve. After all, my sense of direction is strongly tied into my kinesthetic sense, which means I can't ever remember what direction my stolen computer car is going when I'm constantly facing ENE in my basement. I figured I'd get over it soon enough. But when Trash joined us and started helping with the directions after about five minutes of just watching, I suspected my spatial relationship handicap might be a bigger weakness than I thought. We didn't have a PS2 of our own then, and the pirated version I got for PC never worked all that well on my machine, unless I wanted to play one frame at a time. So I didn't really spend much more time on GTA3 until well after GTA4 had come out. Man, I'm telling you right now, just keep me away from GTA4, because my GTA3 gameplay is nothing short of humiliating. I keep forgetting to save my game, which wouldn't be so bad, except that I also keep forgetting how to get out of a car once it's on fire. I can't find my way around town to save my life -- literally. I can't tell you how many times I've been wandering around with my health in the teens, looking in vain for the hospital (I know it's near the police station, which I figured out after all the times I got busted stealing cars right outside the hospital after coming back to life there), until I accidentally drove my stolen tour bus into the harbor. I can't even reliably crash into other cars any more. Pretty much the only thing I can manage is changing the radio stations and being able to tell whether a character is being voiced by Joey Pants or Mikey Rapp. At one point, after several humiliatingly vain attempts at the mission where you destroy the three Chinese laundry vans, my PS2 just quit on me. "I'm not going to be a party to this any more," it said, and refused to read any game CDs, no matter how many times I cleaned them. One night I even brought the unit upstairs and spent two hours trying to fix it, using a walkthrough that I found online. It ended up being a futile, wasted two hours, but since that's how any given two hours of playing GTA3 usually goes for me, I didn't take it too hard. Instead, a few days later I called the Sony help line. I didn't tell them that I had recently cracked the case open and literally written on one of the parts; the unit was used when Trash got it for me more than a year ago, so it's not like the warranty was an issue anyway. The person on the other end of the line asked me a few questions, and then invited me to ship it to them, and they'd send me a new one for 45 bucks. Now, I don't know if you've seen what PS2s are going for, hidden away in the back shelves of the electronic section along with the Atari 2600s and Commodore 64s, but this was a significant savings. So I shipped it off, and a few weeks later, it came back. That very night I brought it downstairs, hooked it up, and fired up my GTA3. Look out, Chinese laundry vans. Except no matter how well they fixed it, I still get lost and/or blown up. I don't trust myself to succeed with the grenades I've been given to do the job, so instead I just keep stealing car after car and crashing them into the vans until I can't drive them any further. The fire engine is handy for that. but it's hard to find, and when I do, I have a tendency to either tip it over in one of those giant potholes (why do I persist in ignoring those traffic cones blocking off the street?) or drive it into the harbor. I should really go online and research the "swim to shore" cheat. Either that, or just put the game away until 2101 or something. posted by M. Giant 12:06 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Grand Theft Auto. Isn't that lovely?
By Wednesday, September 24, 2008 Wi-fi, Why? I used to steal wi-fi from the neighbors. Well, not really. Technically you can’t steal something from someone when they've told you to use it whenever you want, and given you their password and everything. But it's even harder to steal wireless when they don't have it themselves any more. We had been meaning to get wireless in our house anyway. The setup we were borrowing wasn't ideal, because we only had a signal in the end of our house closest to the neighbors', on the second or ground floors, and even then we only had one out of five bars. Obviously on a cell phone that means a staticky, uneven connection, but on the Internet, it just makes a lot of bloggers seem really incoherent. Still, it wasn't really a priority until one night at the beginning of the month when I tried to get on the neighbor's wireless and it wasn't there any more. The laptop just wasn't picking up the signal, even when I held it up against the south wall. I meant to ask the neighbors about it, but with their daughter getting married that week they had other stuff to worry about than continuing to make it easy for their neighbor to steal their wireless connection. Which is fine. We'd been wanting to get our own setup anyway, so now we had an excuse. On Tuesday, Trash called our cable/Internet/phone/life support provider and asked what we had to do to set it up. They gave us two choices: we could pay them to come out and do it for us, after which there would be an additional monthly fee. Or we could go get a wireless router and hook it up ourselves, which would require only a few differently connected Ethernet cables and a quick call to them to flip some switch or something. We went with the former. And you'd think, as old as we are, that we'd know enough to stop ourselves from saying out loud, "How hard can it be?" So I went to Best Buy and, after displaying the depths of my technical ignorance to a sales associate, picked out a mid-priced router that looks like it was reverse-engineered from a UFO. Brought it home, followed the instructions. ran the CD. Nothing. Oh, right, I forgot to call the c/I/p/ls provider to have them twang their magic twanger. After ten minutes on hold, the guy I reached had no idea what I was talking about. He suggested I call the router manufacturer's support line. This was not Comcastic. I would have put up more of a fuss about this if I hadn't seen the words "toll-free" and "24-hour" on the router box. The good news is that the call to the help desk was the last call I had to make that night. The bad news is that by the time I got off the phone with a very nice lady somewhere in the subcontinent, it would have been too late to call back anyway, 24-hour line or no. She walked me through several diagnostics. Or, more accurately, it seemed like the same diagnostic several times. Unplug the laptop from the router and plug it into the old modem. Reset the router. Unplug the router. Unplug the modem. Unplug the laptop from the old modem and plug it into the new router. Unplug the baby monitor and take the batteries out of all the TV remotes, cell phones, Wii controllers, and walkie-talkies. Rearrange the letter keys to spell rude words. Wrap the study in tinfoil and illuminate with a Tesla coil. Repeat, pausing in between every step to type in numbers and read different numbers back to her and change settings according to her instructions and then read some more numbers that may or may not have changed since the last time I looked at them. Each of these steps was fairly time-consuming, and only became more so. For example, when the call started, she was having me hold down the reset button for fifteen seconds. By the time we finished, she was having me hold it down for a week and a half. At one point, she offered to WebEx into my computer so she could see what was on my screen. This would cost me ten bucks, but she assured me that it would allow us to resolve the problem ten times faster. By this point, ten times faster was sounding pretty damn good. If I hadn't gone for it, I'd probably still be on the phone with her. Plus she was totally charmed by the picture of M. Edium I have as my wallpaper, so we both got something out of it. And Trash, who had offered to take care of it the next day while we were both working at home (and what an unproductive day for both of us that would have resulted in), kept picking up the other extension to see what was going on and coming down to visit me. Which was actually kind of nice. It's not like I could kill time by surfing the Internet during this process or anything. Finally, the tech support lady pinpointed the problem. For some reason, by total coincidence, the new modem we got from our ISP like a year ago has exactly the same IP address as the router I got at Best Buy Tuesday night. I have no idea what the odds are of that, but I'm pretty sure the universe just blew the one chance I had at ever winning the lottery. It was nearly midnight when the router was finally up and running and not having to be plugged into the laptop to talk to it. By this time, I was too tired to relish the sense of impending liberation: the ability to be online anywhere in the house or the yard or even the garage. The last step was to have the laptop detect nearby wireless networks. And when it did, the neighbor's was back. I don't care. I'm posting this from the kitchen, and it's awesome. posted by M. Giant 7:20 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:I'm not at all tech-savvy myself (in fact, I just tried to type this comment on a keyboard that isn't even hooked up to this laptop...took me a minute to figure that one out), but we just got wireless through Verizon DSL, and we had the exact same problem: the ISP on the new modem/router was same number as my old router, and nothing would connect. Different manufacturers and everything. Verizon couldn't figure out the problem, it goes without saying that I couldn't figure it out, and it took the tech guy from my office about an hour to get it and work around it. I now owe him a burger and a beer.
By I think you mean "we went with the latter."
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Ha! I knew it! That nice woman you talked to just reads off instructions from a script. I blogged about this very same thing a few months ago and she had me do EXACTLY what she had you do...
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Oh, I have so been there! As the adult who is primarily home during daylight and weekday hours, it has fallen to me to "handle things" (ha) the last three times something's gone wonky with our cable modem/wifi stuff. (Bear in mind that *my* computer is the decidedly un-wifi PC that never leaves its stand, and it is Hubby and Kiddo who actually have laptops, all portable and wifi-able...)
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Let my guess
By You should totally play the IP numbers in the Lotto. You could be rich!
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I am assuming the IP address was 4.8.15.16.23.42
By Monday, September 22, 2008 Spider Man My wife and our temporary roommate should not read this. I've got nothing against spiders. I mean, I've never had one as a pet, like David Sedaris or the recent cast of Big Brother (shout-outs to Penelope and Ted, respectively). But when I see one in the house, my first instinct isn't to step on it. Or even to scream like a girl until someone else comes in and steps on it. Not that anyone reading this would ever do the latter. For a while I would take a slip of paper off the stack of bills in the kitchen, scoop the arachnid up (or down, as the case may be), and deposit it politely outside, on the front steps. Lately, however, I'm not even bothering to do that. Trash and Bitter, I told you not to read this. I think it's because of my new telecommuting lifestyle. I'm here alone for hours almost every day (or effectively so, since Bitter works long, late nights and may be awake for an hour or less every afternoon before heading out), so I've become more attuned to the rhythms of a quiet house. Stuff like Excavator's mandatory extended cuddlefests in my lap at 9:30, 10:45, and 11:30. The muffled clank of the mailbox between 3:20 and 3:40, just as school's letting out across the street. Garbage and recycling on Monday, and the tornado sirens at 1:00 on the dot on the first Wednesday of every month. The spider in the kitchen when I go to get lunch. He* isn't there every day, by any means. Or even every week. At least not visibly. I don't think. But when I see him during these times, I just ignore him. He generally has the courtesy to stay out of sight when everyone's home in the mornings and evenings and weekends, but I think he's used to having the place to himself during business hours. Or at least the parts of the place that the cat can't reach. Overall, my telecommuting is working out well for everyone else in the household; is it fair of me to make him change his routine? And when he did show himself on Sunday morning, almost entirely against his will, he made it worth my while. I slid the toaster oven out from under the cabinet, not realizing he'd been napping under it. He broke cover, sprinted for the edge of the counter, and hurled himself over, trailing an invisible length of emergency web behind him like Bruce Willis with a firehose tied around his waist.  Then, while still two drawer-heights from the floor, he cut himself loose and free-fell the rest of the way before scampering under the baseboard. I probably could have gotten him anyway, but why would I want to? I guess I should admit here that my little coworker has a legspan smaller than half of a shirt button, otherwise lunchtime would obviously be clawhammer time. Because, really, there are limits. Last week in the bathroom I busted the older brother of the gigapede that Trash and Bitter and I (and what a shame they still aren't reading this) dispatched back to the underworld several years ago. And when I say "busted," I don't mean that I arrested him and booked him. Although I did book him, now that I think of it. It was a Stephen King hardcover, in fact. Anyway, like I say, it's actually a good thing Trash and Bitter aren't reading this, because otherwise they'd insist that I get rid of the spider next time I see him. They might even try to convince me that there's more than one. Or, if there's not, that there will be soon if I don't take steps. Preferably on the spider. I'd hate for it to come to that. So would he, I suspect. *Yes, I know it's probably a girl. But referring to it by the proper gender is one step removed from adopting it as a pet, and I'm not ready to go there yet. Give me a few more months. posted by M. Giant 7:33 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:
I was just asked yesterday whether I kill a spider or save a spider. I have no door to the outdoors to which to save spiders from my home. But when a door is available, I save a spider. And I don't really get spiders up here.
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I had a spider for a "pet." Normally spiders die in my place, but Frank (the spider) just stayed in his little corner.
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Many years ago, my then-roommate and I adopted a spider named Melissa. She hung out in a corner of our apartment for the winter, catching the occasional flying object and not bothering anyone.
By There ya go -- just rent "Charlotte's Web." Or better yet, have them read "Anansi Boys." Excellent pro-Arachnid-American propaganda.
By I had a "pet" spider as well. It lived in the corner of my bedroom and really kept to itself. Occasionally, I would chase mosquitos into the web to keep it happy and well fed. Eventually, I set it loose in the world. Good times, though. Good times.
By Friday, September 19, 2008 Sick of Me Check it out -- next week, I'm going to be the guest blogger on the Penguin Blog. That is to say, the blog of Penguin Books, not a blog run by Antarctic sea birds. I doubt any actual penguins would let me guest-blog for them, but then there was a time that I would have said that about Penguin Books, too. You'll be able to read my posts there all week, assuming you don't get sick of me here. Hey, that almost sounds like I just set a challenge for myself, doesn't it? Trash and I had kind of a funny conversation last night, although I can't remember what it was about. After we finished cracking each other up, she said. "How can you say you don't have anything to put in your blog? Write about what we just talked about." "I would," I said, "but most of our conversations are like this, so I never remember them afterward." And sure enough, I don't. Did you remember that today is Talk Like a Pirate Day? I didn't, until late in the day, just like every year. Of course, being a telecommuter, there wasn't anyone for me to annoy with it except Trash and M. Edium. I bet telemarketers look forward to it all year, though. Talk Like a Pirate Day is like an annual microcosm of my general relationship to fads and trends, in the sense that once I've picked up on it and have joined in, it's over anyway. I can't tell you how much embarrassment I've saved myself since then, just by reminding myself of that simple rule and refraining from getting involved. This blog being the obvious exception. Oh, and pretty much every other bandwagon I hopped onto until I was 35, from cigars to swing dancing. Maybe even the trend of bloggers getting book deals, in which case I'm really sorry to anyone who was still planning on doing that. This isn't a new thing, either. When I was five, suddenly one day all the kids my age in the neighborhood had Super Balls, and would climb up to the top of the tennis court fence to bounce them hundreds of feet in the air. I bugged my parents to get me one, and by the time they did, everyone else had moved on to yo-yos. I've been deeply suspicious of yo-yos ever since. (Take a moment if you will to count the items in that last paragraph that date me. You got it -- the reference to five-year-olds being allowed to climb to the top of a tennis court fence is a dead giveaway.) The converse is true as well. I never got into rap, even a little bit, and look what happened there. Just now I took a moment to think back on the last soon-to-be-formerly-popular thing I belatedly took up and all I have to say is, "Oops. Sorry, piano. Well. you had a pretty good run." Well, that should do it. See you at the Penguin Blog! posted by M. Giant 7:45 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:Dead give away on age...climbing to the top of the fence! Good to see you after...14/15 years?!
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If your getting into something makes it suddenly passe, I can think of a number of things I think you should look into, starting with rap and moving on to Monday mornings!
By The penguins might let you guest blog for them, but you'd have to dress formally. They're sticklers for the rules like that.
By I work at the Trader Joes in St. Louis Park and we totally celebrated Talk Like A Pirate Day at the store, some in costume. Though we're all kinda lame too...
By Tuesday, September 16, 2008 Low Camp About a week and a half ago -- that's Friday the Fifth, to be exact -- Trash and M. Edium and I were supposed to go on our second and final camping trip of the summer. But we chickened out as a result of reports of cold, rainy weather in the area we were planning to go. But I didn't want to give up just yet. So I pitched the tent in our back yard on Saturday morning, expecting that we could spend that night camping on our own property. Less packing that way anyway. I had failed -- or, more accurately, refused -- to take into account the possibility that the cold, rainy weather might reach us as well, being only two hours away from where we'd planned to go. We went out to spend the night in the tent on Saturday, and then came back inside for the night just an hour later because it had gotten a) cold and b) rainy. Sunday wasn't going to work because it was a school night. Maybe I could have talked Trash into letting just us guys spend the night out there, but on nights when I'm weecapping Big Brother she has to put him to bed (as opposed to other nights, when she puts him to bed because they both want her to), and I thought that making her do it in a tent would be a bit much to ask. Especially since she would have had to wait out there with him until I got my weecap written and e--mailed off. Alas, we bought our tent years ago, before they came with Internet connections. Monday was cold. Mid-October cold. We do have some sleeping bags that are rated to, like, 20 degrees, but they're so thick that by the time you're done wrestling with them you're too hot to get inside no matter how cold it is. Tuesday it was still cold, and it rained, and I had Big Brother again anyway. The trifecta. Wednesday might have worked, even if Trash still insisted on sleeping in the house without us because she had to work the next day. But after we got home from my father-in-law's retirement party it was already kind of late, and an over-tired M. Edium refused to go to bed inside or out without a stuffed alligator recently brought home from Florida by his cousin Deniece. He has named the alligator "Petrie," after the young pterodactyl in the Land Before Time films (did you realize how many of those movies there are now? They don't even number them any more, but I'm pretty sure they're in double digits. Apparently it was the land before restraint and artistic integrity as well). His pre-bedtime meltdown made camping outside a non-starter, and we never did find Petrie that night. Fortunately, even though he could refuse to sleep without it, he couldn't refuse to pass out from sheer exhaustion just shortly after his usual bedtime. Thursday during the day I decided to go out during the day and roll up the bedding. There was a little water on the floor of the tent, because we'd left one inner window unzipped and also because one of the outer flies doesn't zip at all. I dried the puddles on the tent's tarp floor, threw the sleeping bags in the dryer (even though they don't require an industrial dryer like those space-sacks do, I still did them one at a time), and left the water-spotted air mattresses to deflate and dry on the floor of the tent. That evening it rained harder than ever before, which at least had the benefit of washing off the bird crap that had accumulated on the rain fly. Still, that -- plus the fact that I had two hours of TV to watch and write about that night -- meant another night sleeping in the house. But at least when I'd gone out to get the bedding, I found Petrie. Friday was a lovely, sunny day. I rolled up the now-dry air mattresses and stowed them in their carry bag, which I had neglected to dry. Fortunately that was something I could simply hang from the clothesline pole, even with the air mattresses inside. I fully intended to strike the tent that day, since it had thoroughly dried by now, but Trash thought it would be fun for M. Edium and his scheduled Friday play date to run in and out of the tent that afternoon. This they did for about five minutes, just long enough to track in enough dirt to necessitate sweeping. It would have been a perfectly nice night to camp out, but Chao and Gerd came over for pizza that evening, and even I didn't want to suggest entertaining them in the tent after M. Edium's bedtime. Saturday, even more kids came over, and they played in and out of the tent with Trash's sister until the rain started again. In the evening we went to the wedding of our next-door neighbor's daughter (who was eight years old when we moved in here, Jesus), so between that and the rain and the incipient cold that M. Edium seemed to be developing, camping was again out. Another trifecta. I did hope that the neighbors hadn't brought too many guests back from the reception to see that they apparently lived next to the Joads. Sunday: more rain, plus M. Edium's cold kept him inside all day, plus more Big Brother. The third trifecta of the week. I think that's called a cubed-fecta. Yesterday (Monday) was the first time in days the tent was even remotely dry, so I took advantage of what I knew might be a small window of time to sweep the tent out and take it down. This took longer than I thought, as the floor was wet again and the birds had returned to their work on the rain fly, which I would have to throw in the washer. Eventually I was reduced to spreading the flaccid tent on the driveway and wiping the water off with a bath towel section by section while I folded and rolled it from something that occupies 800 cubic feet to something that occupies two. M. Edium's reaction? "Noooooo!" Oh, and I also took down the bedding bag that I had hung up to dry, three days of rain before. Today I took the rain fly out of the dryer, folded it, and crammed it into the sack that fits over the rest of the folded tent like a Trojan Magnum on a whale. I also took a moment to admire the thick "L" of yellow grass that marks where the tent used to be, and which will probably serve as a guide for where I should put it next year. So that's twelve days of "use" we got out of the tent this month. Not quite the combined total of days that we've had it up since M. Edium was born, but there's always next September. posted by M. Giant 2:52 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Saturday, September 13, 2008 Trash and Mii Thanks for your charity suggestions so far. Keep them coming! * * * Trash got us a Wii a few weeks ago. I wasn't as excited about it as she was. I've never been much of an early adopter when it comes to video games. Like, I just finished Half-Life 2 earlier this year, and am still plugging away on Grand Theft Auto III. I blame my chronic lateness in this area on the fact that when I asked my parents for an Atari 2600 back in the seventies, they told me to save up and buy one with my own money. Do you know how long it takes a kid to save up that amount on a two-dollar paper route? Long enough that by the time I had enough cash, the cartridges for it were almost impossible to find on eBay. So since I finished writing the book, I've been perfectly happy wasting the odd hour on my used PlayStation 2 (that is, until it broke and I had to ship it to Texas last week so they would send me a new one, and it suddenly occurs to me that maybe mailing a video game console to a perfectly-timed rendezvous with a category-3 hurricane maybe isn't the smartest thing I've ever done), sticking to older games and using Guitar Hero controllers with wires and calling myself "retro." Having a Wii in the house kind of blows that whole self-image out of the water. I have to admit it's been fun, though. Not the actual playing, mind you, but the joking and goofing off that goes along with it. For instance, wii've been having a great time cranking out a wii-markable volume of wii-based puns. Something that operates with Wii-motes and steering Wii-ls is pretty much begging for that kind of treatment. One night Chao and his girlfriend Gerd were over, and we were playing Wii Play, which is more or less nine different games representing all of the different ways you can use the Wii-mote. By the eighth game, we were wondering what could possibly be left. Wii sex? Chao obligingly pretended to stick the end of his Wii-mote into his mouth. Hey, it was already wearing a condom. But other games are the opposite of fun, at least to me. For reasons that are entirely beyond Chao and me, Trash and Gerd love this game called Cooking Mama, wherein players use the Wii-mote to simulate cooking tasks. If you do it well, Mama congratulates you. If not, she literally disowns you with a heavily-accented putdown that sounds like nothing so much as "You're not mine!" Find yourself a new Mama, loser. Clearly the Cooking Mama's love is conditional. Aside from that one grim fillip, I can't understand how anyone could find this game Wii-motely fun to play. So I came up with my own idea for a Wii game: Wii Sleep (or, alternatively, SWii-p). You do things like hold the Wii-mote up to your closed eyelid and simulate REMs, or place it on your chest so it can detect the soporific rises and falls, or hook it up to an optional electrode (or Wii-lectrode, as it Wii-re) peripheral so the computer can monitor your alpha waves. I think it'll be a huge hit. Unfortunately, I don't have the skills or resources to make this game happen, so someone else is going to end up getting rich off my idea. But that's fine. I'll just practice for it in advance when I'm watching someone play Cooking Mama, and for once I'll be ahead of the videogame curve. posted by M. Giant 8:14 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:I love my Wii, though I would totally buy Swiip. Heh! I have to say that I think Mario Kart, Mario Galaxy and Boom Blox are my favorite three games. That will likely change when the Star Wars game comes out this Tuesday. You use the Wii-mote as your light saber and the nunchuk to toss people like rag dolls with the Force. I bet that it turns you into an early adopter real quick. :)
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Wii can second the vote for Boom Blox. It's pretty swiit. And the kid could probably do it, too, assuming the wrist strap is properly secured.
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If you don't love the Wii, you aren't playing the right games!!
By Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii is pretty fun, and you can use the nunchuck as a whip in the game, which I figured out accidentially. And don't feel too bad, I only finished Half-life2 earlier this year, and I don't have a book published or a super-genius kid to look after.
By Wednesday, September 10, 2008 This and That I'm a bit starved for topics lately. The combination of writing for other blogs (one of which I'll give you a heads-up on next week -- it's a pretty sweet guest gig), plus Twittering, plus having one's brain cells decimated by spending more hours watching and thinking about Big Brother than does Julie Chen (who, to be fair, does neither) amounts to a bit of blog-block. Add to that the fact that as a telecommuter I hardly ever leave the house and thus encounter way fewer idiots in the wild than I used to, and it's a deadly combination. I've always been annoyed by bloggers who post about how little they have to say, so the fact that I'm doing it now is probably not a good sign. Still, I do have a few things to talk about today, even if they're not funny. Which they're not. * * * First of all, I keep forgetting to mention that I got interviewed and written up by the Washington Times last week, about the book. The resulting piece is here. A bit of interview trivia for you: my cell phone reception inside my house is so crappy that I have to talk to the press from the sidewalk when they call. Except while I was talking to the guy from the Times it kept raining on and off so I had to alternate between hanging out in the drizzle to keep my phone working and ducking back inside to keep it from never working again. Hey, I told you it was trivia. * * * Another thing I keep meaning to mention is the ads on the right of your screen. Trash is in charge of that kind of thing, and she wanted me to mention that the money we get from them goes to charity. So when you click on them, you're making the world a better place. Infinitesimally better, granted, but far be it from me to downplay your contribution. Generally the money goes to either Kiva or Donors Choose. Yes, we know that the Kiva donations are technically loans, and we get paid back by the people overseas who have "borrowed" from us. When that happens, we of course re-loan the money, and the interest, to someone new. Which is cool because with every cycle, the amount we have available to loan gets bigger and the next recipient can do more with it. Like, you don't think that new supercollider just happened, do you? Still, maybe you have some objection to the revenue from your clickthroughs going to classrooms or family entrepreneurs in need. Say no more: Trash wants your suggestions for other charities. In addition to the two already mentioned, we've previously contributed to Malaria No More, the Heifer Project, Modest Needs, and Second Harvest. Of course I would never stop you from making your own donation to any of those fine organizations. In fact, click on any one of those and their site will open in a new window so you can do just that and then come right back here without getting lost. Now Trash is looking for four new charities, to go along with continued donations to Kiva and Donors Choose. Only three requirements: 1) Nothing too big. General rule: if it can afford TV ads, it's not what we're looking for. 2) Nothing overtly political or religious. Sorry, Rosicrucians to Elect Vermin Supreme, them's the rules. REVS will just have to look elsewhere. 3) Finally, we're looking for charities with Internet-based models. We like to do stuff online (see opening paragraph). Oh, and then e-mail them to me. As you no doubt realize, it doesn't count if you just think about them. * * * There was a third thing, but I see that I've already succeeded in padding this entry out enough that I can stop right here and put off that other topic until I've got more to say about it. See you then. posted by M. Giant 7:59 PM 13 comments 13 Comments:
Women for Women is a great group. It's micro-lending that focusies on women in war-torn countries to help them get themselves adn their families back on their feet. Charity Navigator thinks they rock.
By How about Homes for our Troops? They do amazing work with vets returning from war with disabilities. They help them build homes and raise money to help the families.
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I support the Center for Victims of Torture: the web site
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my two cents:
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This is a fantastic idea, completely internet-born and raised, that helps keep girls in some of the poorest parts of Africa from dropping out of school because they can't afford feminine hygiene products. The charity sponsors the making (most are home-made) and distribution of reusable (not wastefully disposable) pads.
By Our favorite charity is MDA. My husband has muscular dystrophy but more than that, so many kids have it. So many kids that were previously thought to be whole and healthy and able suddenly stop being able to run, jump, and play. The MDA is doing all they can to find a cure in order to help these kids be kids.
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We give to Action Against Hunger, which I think I first saw on an ad on your blog. Full circle, I guess.
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Considering what's happening in the southern part of our world tonight, I want to plug the First Response Team - http://www.firstresponseteam.org/
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Along with Donors Choose, we support Child's Play, which donates games and movies to childrens' cancer wards:
By I've been a lurker for...ever, but I had to put the charity I've been supporting with my time for years, Friends Together, into the mix. It's based in Florida and is a nonprofit that works with kids, adults and their family/friends that are affected by the virus. The woman who runs it, Cathy Robinson-Pickett, has one of the most incredible stories I've ever heard. Check out the website. http://www.friendstogether.org
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If I could suggest my personal charity of choice:
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Hey , thanks for the name check.
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How about the Hippo Roller?
By Monday, September 08, 2008 Taco Night I never loved tacos all that much growing up. They were messy, you had to hold your head at a weird angle, and whenever we had them it meant fewer taco shells in the pantry for me the next time I got snacky. Indeed, there's never really been a time in my life when I've sought them out. Except for a few years there. During our last few years of college, the gang used to hang out on Thursday nights at a place near the U of M's West Bank campus. The pints were cheap (free, if you had one of those wooden nickels they used to give out whenever the Vikings scored a touchdown), there was popcorn and darts and pinball and endless indie rock on the satellite radio, and there were nights when literally everybody knew my name. And not just because I was so drunk I kept screaming it at everyone. So why Thursdays? Thursday was taco night. The first time Feb invited us, I honestly wasn't too pumped at the idea. Like I said, I don't like tacos that much. But they were three for a dollar, and we were in college (okay, we were in night classes and earning the national median at our day jobs, but a bargain's a bargain). But these tacos were okay, I thought, for 33 cents each. They weren't anyone's idea of authentic -- one of the more ethnic of our number insisted on calling them "tack-os" -- but they were a good base for the glasses of Leinenkugel I would slam down in between hanging out with actors and sucking at darts. You could order them with or without cheese, and if you wanted sour cream it came in a little paper tetrahedron that you'd use to squeeze it on for yourself. There were other specials during the week. Monday was hamburger night, and Tuesday was sloppy joe night. As far as I know, I was the only one of us who ever ordered all three (though not on the same week), and I was commended for my courage. Since it's a near certainty that the very same ground beef that didn't get eaten in the hamburgers on Monday or the sloppy joes on Tuesday ended up in the tack-os on Thursday, I was never clear on why Iwas the brave one. One Thursday we got there earlier than usual -- I'm talking seven or eight as opposed to the usual ten or eleven -- and the tacos they brought us that night were nothing short of spectacular. It was a revelation, as I realized that taco meat is not necessarily benefited by four hours of simmering in a pan. And this was before putting in an extra few hours of drinking. We didn't make it that early very many times; although I would always want to chase that elusive early taco, more often than not we were lucky to get tacos at all by the time we arrived. Still, we went every week, with more regularity than most people go to church. And the spiritual payoff was nearly as great, as every Friday I would wake up saying, "Oh, God…" But of course the tacos weren't the point. The tacos were just a focal point to get everyone in this giant extended family into one room for a week. I'd missed out on making a bunch of close college friends on my first run-through, but this more than made up for it. Kurt Vonnegut writes about "kurass" in Cat's Cradle, where a "kurass" is a group of seemingly random individuals whose fates are nonetheless intertwined. Call us the kurass of '98. And now those days are gone entirely. The old college local has ill-advisedly attempted to go upscale, and our ridiculously attractive clique is scattered around time zones and continents, many currently working on the next generation. Instead of taco night we have Facebook. And I've lost all interest in tacos out of that context. Give me a burrito or a chimichanga any time. But I have to tell you, Trash put together a batch of taco meat this week in hopes of finding a third food that M. Edium will eat, and for me it was like a Proustian madeleine in a tortilla when I bit into that thing. M. Edium wasn't too interested in them, not having the associations I do as a result of his birth parents being in middle school when Trash and I were in our taco night heyday, but I was astounded at what Trash had pulled off. This wasn't just a college bar tack-o -- it was an early taco. Bliss. Tonight I finished off the leftovers, and I can't tell you how much I'm jonesing for popcorn and darts right now. I planned to have only three tacos, but there was enough for four. Now I just have to drink sixteen beers to maintain the proper ratio. posted by M. Giant 8:00 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
Taco Night! Ahhh, the memories. Okay, making tacos goes on the list of stuff to do when we come back next year.
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I'm down for a new longer-haired version of taco night...
By Saturday, September 06, 2008 Ivory Garage If it were easy to own or play a piano, I don't know how I got this close to my forties without ever managing either one. How do so many other people do it? Trash has always wanted a piano, and so have I. But it just hasn't worked for us in this house. We don't have room. Too many books. But given the way M. Edium reacts whenever he's around a piano, we realized that we needed to make it work somehow. He might have great potential and we wouldn't even know it. And besides, what are children for, if not to allow us to vicariously live through them and serve as a vessel to compensate for our own failures? It would be cruel of us to deny M. Edium that chance. Funny thing about pianos, though. Not only are they large and heavy, they're also really expensive. How would we feel if we spent a couple of mortgage payments on something that would only end up as another, highly space-inefficient bookshelf? So Trash got on Craigslist. Do you know people are literally giving away pianos over there? Seriously, they're like, come and get it, it's yours for the taking. Sadly, it's the "get it" and "taking" parts that gave us trouble. Because even when they're free, that doesn't make them any less large or heavy. And the guy you're getting it from is already giving you a damn piano for free, so it's not like it's his problem to get it over to your house. We gave Chao a call. As a musician whose been in more bands than Eric Clapton, he's got a trailer that we thought we might be able to use. He was happy to oblige and we all went over to the piano donor's house. Some of us were still trying to figure out how we were going to lift it up in there without any kind of ramp, jack, dolly, or helicopter when Chao realized that it was too tall by one inch to fit in the trailer anyway. We could have taken the top board thingy off, but that still would have left us with several millimeters of extra wood. Even that I could have dealt with, but I didn't want to spend the time and leave a big mess of sawdust on the guy's garage floor. Besides, I figured that we could lift it or aim it into the trailer with the required degree of accuracy, but probably not both. Fortunately, we had also called Trash's brother, who owed us one from when we helped moved his piano to Iowa. And back. His wife referred us to the piano mover they'd hired when they moved within town a few years ago, and the next evening, a couple of guys were rolling our new-old piano up the driveway into our garage, where it will live until Bitter vacates the guest bedroom and we either hire them to move it into the house or construct an elaborate series of ramps to do it ourselves. Odds on which one we go with? Part of the service was a quick on-site cleaning checkup right in our driveway. He pulled out a big leaf-blower, and you would not believe the amount of dust that flew out of that thing. How many dust-collecting surfaces can the inside of a piano contain, anyway? For a second it looked like the inside of it was on fire. Then he adjusted the pedals and played it for a minute to check that it's in tune. I hope it enjoyed that, because that's the best it's going to sound for a very long time. So right now there's a piano in our garage and I'm banging clumsily on this keyboard when I'd almost rather be figuring out how to bang clumsily on the other one. So as someone who's going to be picking it up relatively late in life but who already plays several other instruments and can read music, how long do you think it might be before I can learn how to do stuff like play with both hands at the same time, or find "C" without having to do a bunch of math in my head, or perform a beautifully improvised piece of my own composition while suavely participating in a witty conversation? I know Bill Murray learned in, like, a day in that one movie, but those were special circumstances. Considering everything else that's going on in my life, I'm thinking I'd better give myself at least a week or two. And perhaps another day to learn how to suavely participate in a witty conversation, period. After all, the clock is ticking. M. Edium's fourth birthday is coming up next month, and if I want to ruin his childhood with this I'd better get a move on. posted by M. Giant 8:57 AM 7 comments 7 Comments:It's funny that you wrote this now--my husband and I spent this week looking at pianos (him) and talking with piano movers (me) to figure out whether we can get one into our 4th floor walk-up apartment. Sigh. The stairs are out of the question and we're waiting to hear from the "crane guy" about whether the power lines on our street will allow crane delivery through the living room window. I am terrified and will need to be sedated if this ends up happening.
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Play with both hands? A couple of weeks, maybe less. You already play an instrument that requires your hands to do two different things at the same time.
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We went through two years of lessons before we let the kids drop out (I just didn't have it in me to make them practice when they didnt want to). So we had 2 piano-school dropouts by age 7. But we still love having the piano in the house, even though no one can play anything more advanced than "Twinkle, Twinkle".
By Um.... a wooden piano left in a garage for a month in Minnesota in the fall? Uh. Please, please, please spend money on a good tarp for the duration, and a really, really good piano tuner/refurbisher once you get it into the house. For serious. Pianos are actually very delicate and even minor changes in temperature will screw up the strings. PLEASE. With love from the daughter of two professional pianists.
By Presumably, this piano has been saved from the junkyard by being hauled away for the price of the transportation. I'm sure it will forgive you if it is tuned well enough to suit the family. The piano my family had growing up was tuned basically never, and we loved it and learned to play it anyway. Get it inside when you can, have it tuned, and enjoy it.
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I changed my major to music my junior year and had to start from scratch to play well enough to pass the piano exam required for all music majors, no matter their major (mine was voice). It took me about 2 years to learn all major and minor arpeggios and sight read 4-part hymns. Because I was Baroque challenged, and couldn't learn to play a Bach 2-part invention, I failed the first time and the next year was able to play a Bartok Microcosmos book 3 piece instead of the Bach.
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How cool is that? Good on ya, for getting this. I can *almost* get the foot pedal to act properly on the Rock Band drum set, so maybe there's hope for not-that-young guys and new instruments.
By Wednesday, September 03, 2008 Coming Out in the Wash The nice thing about telecommuting is that I can throw a load of laundry in during a mid-Tuesday lull. The tricky part about telecommuting is that by the time you get another lull to transfer it from the washer to the dryer -- or, more accurately, a lull in which you remember or are motivated enough to do so -- it may be Thursday evening. So, yes, our washer is perfectly nice, but it lacks whatever feature would allow me to leave wet clothes in it for days without them starting to smell kind of funny. Unfortunately, this is bundled with my nose, which doesn't always detect funny smells. And so it was that by the end of the week, I had put away at least one load of laundry that had a bit of a funky aura. I should have known something was up when I was awoken on Friday morning by Trash throwing a towel on my face. In that position, even I had to concede that it wasn't exactly April fresh. See, if I weren't the only one in the house with the insensitive nose, it wouldn't have been so bad. We all could have been content, ignorant in our stinkiness and oblivious to my incompetence. Alas, this was not the case. Even that wouldn't have been so bad if this past weekend hadn't coincided with our visit to Trash's mom in Iowa, four hours away. We packed for the trip in about five minutes, just grabbing whatever was in the front of the closet and the top of the drawer, clothes for all three of us crammed into one small duffel. So Trash was a little bit grumpy when we went to unpack and she discovered that everything in there was redolent of damp feet. And the stuff that wasn't stinky before certainly was now. Even M. Edium kept saying, "I smell something baaaad." Sorry, kid. That would be your pajamas. At least it was only a short trip, and we were staying literally across the road from a Wal-Mart, where I went and picked up some cheap clothes for that night and the next day. I don't know what we would have done had we discovered the situation after arriving for, say, a three-month visit to Everest Base Camp. Also, Trash's mom had a couple of outfits that she was going to give M. Edium for his birthday. Suffice to say that he got them early. But the upside of all this is that instead of putting off laundry when we got home like I usually do, I had a load in while the heat was still ticking out of the engine of Trash's car. So clearly I've learned my lesson. Now I should get going. The dryer stopped yesterday and I should probably get the clothes out of it before they wrinkle. posted by M. Giant 7:16 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:It's much easier to just throw out your dirty clothes and buy new ones.
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What we need are clothes that repel stink or come pre-loaded with Stink-B-Gone...
By We forget about clothes in the washer all the time too. Next time, don't try to dry them yet--instead, toss a 1/2 cup of baking soda into the washer and run a rinse-n-spin cycle. Presto! (Just remember this time to take the clothes out and dry them...)
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