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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Tuesday, March 30, 2010 Movies 1q10 Here's a thing I didn't expect to happen -- every movie I saw in the theater this quarter had at least one actor in it that I've recapped on TV. And so did most of the ones I watched at home. This was not at all intentional, although as the quarter wore on I found myself looking for faces whose previous performances I'd watched five seconds at a time. I won't bore you with who was in each one (unless someone asks), so let's get to it. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs M. Edium and I were shopping at Costco and he kept gravitating to the TV that was showing this, as he hadn't seen it yet. I told him to stick with me, and if we finished shopping in time, I'd hook him up. Wouldn't he rather see the whole thing all at once? And then that afternoon, we went to a second-run theater in a suburb that was still showing it. Dad win! He picked out seats for us in the front row, so it was kind of hard to see everything that was happening at once, especially when things got really crazy toward the end. Ultimately, I don't know which of us liked it more. Towards the end he tried to cover my eyes, which is what he does to his mom at the end of WALL-E because she cries every time. I'm not sure where that came from. The Evil Dead Second movie in a row that starred my personal hero, Bruce Campbell (also brilliantly cast as The Mayor in Cw/aCoM). I don't have to tell you about the movie itself because I first saw it in junior high and remembered it for years afterward as the scariest movie I'd ever seen, until I saw it again at a friend's apartment in my early thirties and thought, Damn, I was a wuss in junior high. This was one of those Midnight Movies at the Uptown Theater. Now, Midnight Movies at the Uptown are pretty much a local institution, so they don't need to mess with them. But they have anyway. Specifically, there's an amateur filmmaker that someone at the Uptown has mistaken for some kind of "local celebrity," and they have him "host" some of the movies. "Host" in this context meaning "make the movie start later so he can waste a bunch of everyone's time and make it so they all get back to their cars when it's a half hour later and ten degrees colder." Obviously it's a pretty thankless task, but he keeps coming back. Anyway, part of the "host's" pre-show "entertainment" was randomly selecting audience members to come up on the stage and play an game called "Plinko Apocalypse," which is just Plinko with the word "Apocalypse" painted on the homemade board right under the word "Plinko." Audience members were selected by drawing the numbers on their ticket stubs, and it took a while to get three players up there. The first was a surly blonde named Kelsey who pouted up there while the holders of the next few tickets that were drawn either couldn't find their stubs or kept quiet. I myself was fully prepared to stick mine into Chao's hand if it was drawn. As I told him at the time, "I'm a little scared of Kelsey." This went on for a little too long until Kelsey finally piped up that the day before had been her birthday. "And you know what I want for my birthday? I kinda wanna see The Evil Dead." See what I mean? Thankless. More movies later in the week. Hopefully I can stretch this out until next quarter and I won't have to come up with any more new topics until July. posted by M. Giant 8:09 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, March 28, 2010 Flour Child After my last entry about a bread maker, my sister DeBitch the Elder gave us hers. It works much better than our last one; a perfect loaf every time. We love it. And so, it seems, do the people with whom we share its output. It's possible they're just being polite, but last week when the neighbors up the street invited us to dinner and we brought along a loaf like the one we made last time we dined together, they didn't seem merely pleased, but relieved. So it's not like we make our own bread just to be cheap. If that were the case, we wouldn't also be buying bread in the store. And even if we weren't, bread ingredients add up in cost as well. Or at least they would, if I hadn't realized a while ago that all the different recipes pretty much taste the same and I might as well just stick with the one that uses water, sugar, bread flour, and yeast. Still, that bread flour and yeast isn't cheap. Or at least it didn't used to be. Yeast, of course, comes in a tiny little envelope that never contains the exact amount you need, so you always have to either tape a corner down or balance the open envelope upright in the pantry. And they're expensive for the amount you get in those little envelopes, but I suppose you're buying tiny little creatures, after all. Which must be how they're able to tip over their little envelope and escape from the pantry. Then there's the bread flour. Regular flour doesn't work, for some reason. I've tried it; instead of a loaf of bread, you get a large, brittle, bucket-shaped cracker that tastes like feet. Eventually, though,. Trash figured out that you can buy yeast in bulk at Costco. It comes in a vacuum-sealed brick, and although we opened it sometime last year, we haven't made a visible dent in it. The only downside is my fear that someday all those little creatures might realize they outnumber us and launch an uprising. The bread flour, however, continues to be an issue. I've resisted her suggestion to buy Costco bread flour, because it only comes in fifty-pound bags and we're not a bakery. I figured that storing fifty pounds of anything edible in our house was the equivalent of putting up one of those multi-beam searchlights, only but for bugs. But the other day, when I was making a Costco run, she stated her position again. I think she had convinced herself that a 25-pound bag was available. She also made the point that we'd gone through a five-pound bag in less than a month, which I had to confess was a good one. But then I got to the store and saw the bread flour, which, as I remembered, only came in the fifty-pound size. To give Trash an idea of the scale of fifty pounds of flour, I sent her a picture, with the only item of recognizable size I could immediately lay hands on:  Even then I don't think she got it, because at first she thought it was M. Edium's shoe instead of mine. Even though he wasn't with me at the time. And lest you think that you still can't determine the scale without knowing my shoe size, I should mention that just today, Trash made a charming reference to my "canoe feet." Speaking of M. Edium, he was quite amazed when he got home later and found this massive sack of flour taking up most of our kitchen table. Sometimes, when he's being particularly fractious, Trash will tell me to pick him up like a sack of flour. And now here he was, next to a sack of flour that was almost exactly his weight. I scooped one of them up in each arm and held them that way for a moment. It turns out that fifty pounds of human feels lighter than fifty pounds of flour, not least because the human knows how to hang on. I mean, I guess the flour does too, but in a different way and only if the bag is open. M. Edium thought this was hilarious. The flour, however, seemed indifferent. He was fascinated. He kept wanting to get on the table with it and move it around and try to pick it up, which obviously I knew could only end badly. One might almost say he bonded with it. I think if I had let him, he would have tried to shape it into his own likeness. There have been times when M. Edium has agitated for a sibling. I think he realized that this is probably as close as he's going to get. posted by M. Giant 10:29 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:The best place to store flour in large quantities is in the freezer. It keeps the bugs away. It's easier if you portion it first into 5lb containers. Also for pantry storage the buckets they use at bakeries are airtight and you can usually get them for free from any restaurant/bakery
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Bay leaves. Don't know why, but a couple of bay leaves in the open bag or container in your pantry will discourage bugs.
By You should also keep your yeast in the freezer.
By Now that you already have your life-time supply of bread flour, this suggestion is too late, but you can make your own bread flour. The main difference between all-purpose flour and bread flour is that bread flour has more gluten in it. Add 1 T of gluten flour to 1cup of all-purpose flour. The gluten flour may last as long as the Giant Bag O' Bread Flour, but it doesn't weigh 50 lbs.
By Friday, March 26, 2010 The Easy Weigh When I went to my annual check-up a year ago, it turned out that to my surprise, I had lost an unspectacular but measureable amount of weight. At that point, I had been working from home for almost a year, and I chalked it up to that. That may sound dumb, but there are a lot of factors that change when you stop going to the office. You also stop raiding the vending machines, because there aren't any, and when you do get a snack, it's a small handful of chips or crackers instead of a whole bag that you end up feeling obligated to finish. When there's a project you're avoiding, you do a load of laundry (and all the stair climbing that goes along with that) instead of procrastinating on the Internet. And if you decide to spend a whole day just working out instead of doing your job, nobody notices. As far as I know. Even better than the news that I'd lost weight was that I'd done it without any conscious effort. Now I could just keep doing what I was doing and wait for the pounds to continue to melt away. They would melt slowly, like a snowbank on a 31-degree day, but it would happen without me having to try any of these radical new fads like diet or exercise. I may be on the blobby side now, but if I could just keep it up I'd go through my fifties looking like a Lipitor commercial. As this year's check-up approached, I tried not to make too much of the fact that my pants feel tighter. I just wrote it off as not having bought any for the past couple of years, other than the ones I was wearing. Yeah, no. In the past year, I gained back everything I lost and then some. I could see my Lipitor-commercial future receding into my own pendulous jowls. So what changed? And how to change it back? I have a few theories. M. Edium. Being the father of a five-year-old is a lot less demanding, at least physically, than being the father of a four-year-old. Now that he's old enough to follow verbal directions more readily and keep himself out of life-threatening situations for minutes at a time, my parenting style has become more sedentary as a result. Yes, he knows not to run out into traffic, but I'm going to have to be buried in a shipping container. Hardly a fair trade. My office-mate. I used to get busy and forget to eat lunch sometimes. That never happens now that Trash works at home with me. And my once-common lunches of Pringles and Eazy-Cheese are long behind me now. I can only conclude that these balanced midday meals she's always making me eat are packing on the pounds. Bad Food Night. Yes, some of the more exotic dishes we've put together for our almost-weekly dinners with Chao have recipes that are posted on This Is Why You're Fat. But we're always careful to download those recipes from different sites. Shouldn't that count for something? The recaps. Mid-January through early March is my busiest time at TWoP, with four shows on the air at the same time. Writing in punishing detail about up to three and a half hours of television a week necessitates a whole lot of time sitting at the computer. But then I did that last year too, at the same time. Maybe the difference is that I was more stressed out about it. This time I knew it could be done. Plus I just wrote them all with a macro anyway and then spent the time I saved playing video games. The cats. As previously mentioned, Trash thinks I've become too submissive to our feline companions. I may be forced to admit she's right. Or I at least need to start making better use of those intervals when there isn't one in my lap, holding me down. Ten seconds of Tae Bo a day couldn't hurt, right? I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that if I really want to find the source and solution to this problem, I need to look in the mirror. And I tried that, but I couldn't see anything around myself. Just have to keep searching, I guess. Eventually I'll find something I can pin this on. I'll look later, though. I've got a lot of other stuff to write after I finish this entry, and anyway if I get up now, the cats will jump down and shake off all those deep-fried Pop-Tart crumbs I've been spilling on them for the last few hours, and it'll take me like ten minutes to get M. Edium to clean it up. posted by M. Giant 7:56 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:Maybe you should have another baby. With no time to sleep, or eat, you're sure to drop those extra lbs. Plus, you'll have five years of strict supervision to keep you busy. :D:D Trust me, I'm looking at the cause of my sleep deprivation right now.
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Two words. Stomach. Flu.
By Tuesday, March 23, 2010 Off Key So because it's been a while since I blogged about my plans to become a piano god, I thought maybe I would update you on where I am on that project: nowhere. Okay, short entry. Thanks for reading! Fortunately, there's actually a little more to it than that. Yes, it's true that while I have spent a negligible amount of time working through the first few pages of a method book or two, my piano playing is far below the level of any self-respecting professional, amateur, beginning, quadruple-amputee, pre-verbal, or non-human musician you've ever heard. It's rather humbling. I picked up both the saxophone and the guitar way faster than this. Whether that was a function of the fact that I was under twenty, with a brain whose neural pathways had not yet calcified into the hard-wired "read-only" status it's in today, or the fact that I did not then have two jobs and a wife and a kid and a house to keep up, I leave for the theorists to debate. Let me know what you decide, theorists. Then around the beginning of the year, something happened that I thought might help me get through my road block. We finally got M. Edium signed up for piano lessons, and on Monday evenings he's been going to a place close enough to walk to (not that we have many times). I had no idea how kids with no musical experience (beyond incessantly pressing buttons on toy radios, boom boxes, iPods, and instruments as a baby and toddler) are supposed to start. I mean, it hasn't been that many years since he first learned the sounds that letters in the alphabet make, but now he's supposed to figure out what sounds the letters in the scale make? Instinct tells me to start by teaching him "A," but you can't even play an A-major scale without getting into flats and sharps, which hardly seems fair. Especially since I can't do that at all myself. Fortunately the teacher and the book she picked out for him seem to take an instinctive, visual approach. He learned how to play simple melodies on clusters of black keys before even being introduced to the concept of white-key notes like D and C. Students "learn along with" two characters in the book, a pair of cartoon animals named Mozart Mouse and Beethoven Bear, who compose four-bar, one- to three-note symphonies for students to play despite not knowing themselves what A is yet. Which is actually where he is right now, after six weeks of lessons. I was kind of hoping to pick up a little bit myself, taking him to lessons and helping him practice during the week. And it's actually working. Between those lessons -- and my years of deep musical background that includes not only a class in music theory but real-world experience playing in bands marching, concert, and garage -- I can now play simple melodies on clusters of black keys and can now identify white-key notes like D and C. I actually cheated a bit to see how difficult things get at the end of the book. By then, Beethoven Bear and Mozart Mouse have at least touched all the natural notes in the scale, despite refraining from cramming more than a couple of them into the same piece. I considered practicing those without M. Edium, but I feel like I should wait for him. Even if those "parent or teacher accompaniment" bars printed underneath the exercises for a more experienced player to join in on make me feel like a failure as both. But we'll get there eventually. One day I hope to be able to actually play something with both hands, even if M. Edium accomplishes that before I do. I just hope it happens before a) M. Edium moves out or b) Beethoven Bear goes deaf and Mozart Mouse succumbs to syphilis. posted by M. Giant 6:12 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, March 21, 2010 Office Mate I know that it's the first rule of blogging to not blog about your day job. And the only rule more important than the first rule is not to blog about your coworkers. But I really wanted you a little bit about the fellow employee who is my current office-mate. If she wants to complain to HR, I guess she can, but I think that if she had any objection to my writing about her here, she could have made them at any time in the past eight years. Yes, I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but Trash and I now work at the same company, although in different departments, and for different bosses who report to different bosses' bosses all the way up to senior management. Yet we work pretty close together. Which is not entirely surprising given the fact that most of our respective teammates work in different time zones. In our company, geographical proximity has little or nothing to do with proximity on the org chart. The other main difference is that she has a desk and a phone to go to at the office, whereas I don't. But she never goes there and has her desk phone permanently forwarded to our house, so that's not so much of a difference after all. So the way it works most days is that my study -- the ten-by-twelve room that opens off the living room -- is now our study. It was awkward at first, since I had already claimed the big table/desk we got from our neighbors and she was stuck with TV trays. But then on a walk, we found a rolling computer desk that we brought home, and now she has that next to her TV trays so it's all better. The company offered to pay for a second business line for both of us, but our conference calls usually don't conflict, and when they do, that's what cell phones are for. People tend to hear about our arrangement and ask, "So how's that working out?" Like we're supposed to be annoyed at spending all our time together, day and night. The truth is that we don't. One of us usually has to drop M. Edium off at school in the morning and pick him up in the afternoon, and we hardly ever do that together. Yes, we're apart for up to fifteen minutes at a time, but that's also what cell phones are for. I suppose it would be different if we weren't both equally busy most of the time. If one of us was always swamped and the other was always slow and being like, "So, what'cha doin'?" it might get a little tense. But generally we're both swamped, and when one of us isn't, that person generally uses the downtime to make lunch or do housework rather than bugging the other. And unlike before, we can now communicate even when one or both of us is on the phone, thanks to the inter-office IM system (of course it's all work-related). This can be especially handy when M. Edium is at home, now that he's getting old enough that spelling things out doesn't work as well. We can simply IM each other anything we don't want him to overhear (of course that's also work-related. Client confidentiality, you know). Plus now we can have lunch together almost every day (not that we often have the same thing) and can go for short walks together now that it's warmer outside. And we can help each other with our work, whether it's me proofreading something for her or her doing a large research project for me. In fact, this is such a sweet deal I'm considering not posting this for fear of messing it up. Years ago, we worked for different divisions of a different company. Back then, we lived eight blocks from our office and worked three floors apart. Now we sleep one floor from our office and work three feet apart. This way is better. posted by M. Giant 5:31 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:You guys are awesome.
By Lucky! Just finding a computer desk like that! I need one of those so bad, and I never see anything good on my walks! Plus, I'm sleep deprived with the new baby, (my nephew, not son, but as much as I do, I'd like to have that amended. Maybe being co-parent would work.) Anywho... yeah, free stuff.. and sleep would be good.
By If I didn't love you so much, you'd be, like, the barfiest couple ever.
By Thursday, March 18, 2010 Pie Day One of the places Trash where Trash used to work when she was in high school was a sit-down pizza place by her house called Carbone's. It was a bit of a cop hangout, and one of her favorite stories to tell about that time was when she was new, and one of the local officers -- a friend's dad, no less -- was complimenting her on how well she was refilling his water glass from the pitcher. "Thank you!" she said, turning her whole body toward him in a way that caused the water from the pitcher to begin filling up his lap. But this isn't about that. This is about the pizza. Trash loved the pizza while she was working there, and still does. I do too. So does M. Edium. So do most of the friends and family we have dragged there. The problem is, and has been, that while it's part of a chain, the only franchises tend to be found in the outlying suburbs. There is one that's way on the other side of the city, but it's way on the other side of the city. Put it this way: years ago, when Trash's brother lived three miles closer than Carbone's than we do, he called to order a pizza. As a throwaway comment, almost as a joke, he added, "Don't supposed you'd deliver out here?" They said they would, but when they got there, the driver told him, "We are never delivering here again." BIL paid for his pizza and happily agreed, because the main ingredient in Carbone's pizza is happiness, and there's enough in one little square slice to make up for all manner of abuse from a pizza guy. This is not to say we don't have pizza places in our neighborhood. In addition to Pizza Hut (M. Edium's favorite, but he'll grow out of it), there are a few options, but they're expensive or bad. The closest one is six blocks away, and has been through any number of failed iterations. I think the most recent one is called Gamy's. We picked up a pizza there once when we were out on a walk. You know how aficionados talk about different styles of pizza, like Chicago style or New York style or Italian style? This place made grade-school cafeteria style, only with more pepper. So truly local pizza just didn't seem to be in the cards for us. Then, the other day, Trash got the mail and started jumping up and down with excitement. She held up a mailer with the Carbone's logo on it, and I was like, "Oh, good, we're on their coupon mailing list now. Neat." Then she handed me the mailer, which read, in part, "New!! Coming to [our neighborhood]: Carbone's Pizzeria" My only problem with any of that was that there weren't enough exclamation points. Trash went to pick up M. Edium from school early. He was home by 4:30. By 4:31, he was in his Radio Flyer and we were on our way to pick up the pizza we'd called ahead to order. "We're walking to Carbone's!" I said, jumping up and down with excitement. According to the mailer, the address of the new shop was where Gamy's used to be. As we approached on foot, we noticed that the Gamy's sign was no longer there. But there wasn't a new Carbone's sign, either. Instead, taped to the inside of the glass door, was a hand-lettered sign on a piece of printer paper that read: "Coming soon: Carbone's -- Opening 3/16." The last digit was in bold because it had clearly been changed from a five. When I went in to pay for the pizza, I asked the cashier if they had been busy. "More than we expected," he said. "We weren't going to open today, but a lot of people stopped by for lunch, so we did." I'm used to rushing home with the Carbone's and getting there when it's no longer as hot, and half the toppings have slid off it because of my two-wheeled turns. But this was a much more leisurely dining experience, with Trash pulling the wagon while I carried the box and handed out slices. I suspect there's pent-up demand in our area for the product. When Chao picked up a second pizza to bring over to our house for lunch the next day, there were two people in front of him in line, and about ten kids from the high school were eating their pizza out front. And all for a place that doesn't even have a sign yet. The only things that could be driving the business is the mailers, previous familiarity with the product in the local market, word of mouth, and the sight of our family walking down the street eating it the previous afternoon. Obviously we might be in a little bit of trouble here. I can easily see us ending up very poor and very large. We're addressing one of these problems in advance by making a rule that we can only eat there if we walk (or if a friend brings one over). That might not solve the poverty issue, but now that Carbone's is in walking distance, we can always sell one of our cars if we need to. Or, as Trash suggested, offering to let them put one of those ad condoms on one of them in exchange for four pizzas a week. That might seem like a low price, but clearly they're not in that much need of advertising anyway. I knew there was a reason we've stayed in this house for almost seventeen years. posted by M. Giant 8:36 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, March 16, 2010 It's Been Real So, time may be up. The clock is ticking. Counting down to the top of the hour. Sorry, I'm just trying to get all my time metaphors out of the way before I get into the meat of this piece about the possible end of 24. I was more into it than anyone else I knew when it premiered in 2001. It wasn't always easy to get the channel switched over from Buffy right at eight, and Trash quit on the show pretty early on. But I was fascinated by the real-time concept, and was beyond eager to see how it was going to be pulled off. The answer, of course, was that it wasn't, always, but that first season was pretty entertaining. Episode 12, when Kiefer closed in on Ira Gaines and rescued his family, remains a legend that the show has yet to top. I limped through the second season, missing several episodes, including the finale. And when the third season premiered, I didn't bother to tune in at all. "It's just too much work to keep up with," I told Trash. Several months later, I found myself on the phone with Sars, who was saying to me, "So…24?" I still don't know what became of the original recapper, Gustave, who originated the character names of Kiefer, Spawn, Potato Face, and Soul Patch, a couple of which I still use. All I knew was that I had some big shoes to fill. That was almost six years ago, and it's how I ended up starting my favorite writing gig ever. This is not to say that 24 has always been my favorite show to recap. I've been privileged to cover better shows (Six Feet Under, Big Love, Rome), shows that fit my abilities better (Kid Nation, Rock Star: Supernova), and shows that frankly felt like a punishment for something I'd done wrong (Windfall, Tell Me You Love Me, Big Brother). But it was hard not to think of 24 as -- and this is going to sound really pretentious -- my own personal "flagship" show. I always felt like if I ever needed, for whatever reason, to drop every show but one, 24 would be that show. Which is not to say that it doesn't make me crazy. Like many great relationships, this is of the love-hate variety. And no, I'm not talking about the infamous cougar "plotline," which I recall (possibly incorrectly) as just a brief shot, almost a throwaway moment that's been blown out of proportion as everything that's ever been wrong with the show in general, and the Kim storylines in particular. When in fact there are so many more unforgivable sins the show has committed over the years. Teri's amnesia storyline in Season One. Marwan's Rube Goldberg plan to nuke L.A. in Season Four. And worst of all, the fact that people from young intelligence agents all the way up to Antonin freaking Scalia cite Jack Bauer as a model for how real-life interrogators should behave. This show has probably done more than any John Yoo memo to legitimize torture in the eyes of the American people, and I am so not cool with that. So it was with mixed emotions that I heard last week that 24 might be getting canceled. It's expensive, it's plateaued, the whole bit. You know the deal. Of course I've been hearing for years that every season might be the last one. Hell, I'm on record myself as saying the first season would be the last one. Or at least the last full season. Remember Murder One? Exactly. Now I'm working on my 115th episode recap of the show, which I believe is the second-oldest scripted series TWoP covers (after Smallville, whose ex-recapper Omar is, I hope, reading this with patient indulgence). I've been doing this longer than I was in high school and junior high combined, and frankly, have expended a lot more mental effort at it. And I think 115 is more episodes than any actor has appeared in, with the obvious exception of Kiefer Sutherland himself (thank you, Mary Lynn Rajskub's maternity leave!). And so it was with even more mixed emotions that I heard that NBC might pick it up. On the one hand, maybe the show really has run its course, even discounting NBC's historical anti-Midas touch. On the other hand, last night's episode -- coming at a point in the season when the show's typically just marking real time between the exciting kickoff and the shocking finale -- may actually have been its second-best ever. I was actually rubbing my hands in glee at the end of it, and the last time I did that with a show Katee Sackhoff was on, it sure as hell wasn't this one. So, to wrap up with more obligatory time and clock imagery, as 24's metaphorical alarm clock finally goes off, it looks like I might be combining my love-hate relationship with this show with my love-hate relationship with something else that's a big part of my life: the snooze button. posted by M. Giant 10:36 AM 3 comments 3 Comments:What a timely post...pun intended. I just deleted 11 hours of 24 from this season off my DVR. It was staring us in the face as our % available creeped steadily downward. A quick click of the remote and we are no longer committed to watching what I've heard is a fairly mediocre season. But I may go back and read your recaps....much faster than watching an episode although I'm sure each one takes you many, many hours.
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Having re-watched S2 recently, you're correct on the cougar "plotline". (Admittedly what cracked me up the most about watching that the second time was that she was rescued by Johnny Chase.) My own personal low points for 24 (besides all the torture porn, which as well as being dodgy as all hell also became kind of.. boring after a while - quick! Torture someone! Just once it would be nice to get some false information and go haring off for three hours on the completely wrong track) are pretty much all the virus parts of S3 - these are also my high points, being some of the funniest bad science I've ever watched.
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Your recaps of 24 are what made me start reading your blog.
By Thursday, March 11, 2010 Set Up, Episode V It's the paradox of Legos that the more you have, the harder it becomes to find the one you want. Last summer, when I found myself becoming overwhelmed with how hard it was to find anything in the two-gallon bin M. Edium's birth mom had given us, I enthusiastically signed on to help himbuild a Death Star. The end result was a very low-resolution plastic orb a little smaller than a basketball that kept collapsing in on itself, and a Lego bin with barely enough useless little pieces to cover the bottom. I was in the process of shoring up the roof by seeing how many usless little pieces I could drop through the holes in it, when Trash pointed out that maybe tying up all of M. Edium's Lego pieces into one crappy project was not an entirely laudable goal. And that was before the advent of the many Star Wars sets he's gotten since. But this week, three elements have aligned to give me hope. And no, it's not the resurrection of the V-19 Torrent. I'm on like, the fourth step of step twelve on that thing. The first is my new project of sorting the Legos by color. I've been robbing bowls, Tupperware, and empty cottage cheese bins from the kitchen (something else that, fortunately, we have way too much of) and have started containers of white, black, gray, dark gray, yellow (young Anakin Skywalker's favorite color, evidently, and I assume the only reason he didn't wear a Jedi robe that color is because he would have looked like Brother Dick Tracy), brown/tan, and Republic maroon/Separatist blue. Those just happen to be the colors with the highest proportion of weird shapes in them, so now it's easier to find, say, a flat piece with two bumps and a funny little claw at the end if I know what color it is. The second is a book he bought for himself using a gift card: Lego Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary. It sounds dorky, but it's even more so in practice. M. Edium uses it for inspiration, because it contains photos of every Lego Star Wars set ever. Until recently, it has usually led to frustration, because he doesn't have the giant curved angle pieces needed to build, say, Jabba's sail barge. But last weekend he discovered the page with all the minisets: smaller versions of the ships that you need special pieces to build in the larger scale. The nice thing is that the minisets seem to be made exclusively of pieces he already has -- at least in shape. He doesn't care about the color of anything he builds. Or, more accurately, "colors." Which is why that Death Star came out looking like a giant ball of solid plastic hurl. Item the third is this. The book includes the number for each set. M. Edium reads me the number and I punch it into this page to pull up the instructions on the laptop, and he goes to town.  Left to right: AT-ST (scout walker), Republic Gunship, the builder. It's a shame Clone Wars-era spacecraft are so ass-fugly.  How adorable is that little antenna dish? Don't you just want to scritch it like the ear of a one-eared gerbil?  Background: the AT-TE that took us both two full days to build. Foreground: the min-scale version, which M. Edium built by himself in twenty minutes.  The Rebel Blockade Runner in its docking bay is actually a grain of rice. Pretty much my only role in these projects is to run the laptop and help him find the pieces he needs. During my downtime, I busy myself hunting up the next piece for the V-19 Torrent (only 8,326 to go!) and keeping the chaos from devolving. We're both having a great time. And when he has to cannibalize one of his minkits to build the next one, I have no problem with it. And he has no problem with the fact that this time the V-19 is going back together with Super-Glue. Although, to be honest, I'm not sure he knows. posted by M. Giant 9:33 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, March 10, 2010 Stick It Most days this time of year, I wear a heavy hooded sweatshirt around the house. I like to keep the pockets free of trash and debris, because I don't like finding stuff in there when I stick my hands in. This is true of more things than just pockets, but let's keep on topic. Right now, however, there are a pair of folded, spindled, and mutilated address label-sized stickers, which are stuck together but have become so fuzzy they'll never stick to anything else again without duct tape. Also they've been on the floor of a public bathroom. I don't remember where we got them, but they feature animated Disney characters and read, "This Disney DVD's owner is The Alexander Family." It's the kind of thing that seems more useful at first glance than it actually is. First of all, do we put the labels on the DVD cases? Because the actual DVDs are the only things that ever leave the house, in their CD wallet. So I guess the label goes on the disk, but of course it can only go on the side with the label already on it. And what's the actual benefit? It's not like there's any contact information included on the label. If a DVD escaped Toy Story style and were captured as little as one block away, the finder would read that label and think one of two things. One would be, And what am I expected to do with that bit of data?, and the other would be, Not any more, it doesn't. I suppose it might come in useful if you're on a plane, and one of the disks slips out the CD wallet or the player while switching movies, and it goes rolling up the aisle under the seats. When it fetches up, a flight attendant can hold it up looking for the Alexander family, and hopefully you can retrieve it before an Air Marshal confiscates it on the suspicion that it's a CD-ROM full of national secrets. Or if a kid brings it to a sleepover, it can scotch all those endless arguments about who brought which movie. But even that has limitations. What if you stick one of these labels on a movie from DreamWorks or Paramount or Sony Animation or that store downtown with the blacked-out windows? If the finder can see that it's not a Disney DVD despite what the stick-on label may claim, it calls all the rest of the information printed on there into question. Except maybe in the case of that last example, when you might actually want it to. So why, do you ask, am I carrying these around all day in a pocket I normally consider my own personal, portable clean room? While eating breakfast on the third day of Trash's trip to Florida, M. Edium pulled one of these labels off the sheet, carried it over, and stuck it on my arm. "That's your reward for spending time with me," he said. Of course I told him that spending time with him was its own reward. And then he brought me another one to stick on my t-shirt, since the one on my hoodie wasn't sticking, and said, That's for spending so much time with me." He also moved that one to my t-shirt. I wore them both for the rest of the morning and lunch, when they fell off in the men's room and I stuck them in my pocket. Now, I ask you, would you want to get rid of those stickers? posted by M. Giant 4:45 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, March 08, 2010 Set Up I've already shared my mixed emotions about those Star Wars tie-in Lego sets that M. Edium has been accumulating for almost a year now, starting with Darth Vader's TIE Fighter. That was fun to put together, and then it was even fun for a while to put back together, until he decided to dismantle the entire thing. It hasn't been back together since, unless you count a brief stint during which a fair number of the pieces were part of a shambling, Frankenstein-like abortion of a TIE Interceptor over the holidays. That was the great thing about Lego sets during my first go-round with them. You could build more than one thing with them. Now they come with just enough pieces and instructions to build one thing. I understand that the old Gungan Sub set back in 1999, the first year of Lego Star Wars, featured a couple of different optional configurations, but they probably gave up on that concept when it didn't sell well. Never realizing that the problem there wasn't with multiple building choices, but with Gungans. So here we are. Last month, M. Edium used his allowance and some money he'd earned cleaning the house to buy himself a Droid Tri-Fighter (don't feel bad if you don't know what that is, because it's from those prequel space battle scenes when there are so many pixels swarming around the screen you can't even tell what's going on, let alone what anything is). He and I spent part of that evening and part of the next morning putting together a model of a spacecraft you can't remember, using Legos that have no other use. This week it went back down to its component parts. "It's time," he said. Eventually, "it's time" for everything, usually within a matter of weeks. The mid-scale Millennium Falcon lasted a couple of months after he got it for his birthday, and the giant six-legged AT-TE Santa brought him is still 98% intact, although the inevitable process of erosion as he cannibalizes parts for other projects has already begun. There's always a sense of mixed emotions when that happens. On the one hand, he's exercising his creativity, learning how to build things on his own, from concept to execution, developing skills that he'll one day need when his bathroom ceiling falls in on him. On the other hand, that fucking thing cost anywhere from fifteen to fifty dollars and I'm never going to see it again. I know what you're thinking. "Just reassemble it some time." Sure, I'll just rummage around his 31-quart Lego bin and dig out all twelvety thousand and infinity pieces and slap them together next time I have a spare century. Which is where my other beef is with all these "specialty" pieces in the Star Wars kits. The other day, he got it in his head to rebuild his V-19 Torrent. My dad actually built that one with him, and it took a few weeks' worth of visits. The instruction book is, no shit, printed in two volumes, and the guts of the thing had so many moving parts I keep expecting to have to attach a starter cord to it. All of which are held together by these infuriating little fiddly bits that either sink immediately to the bottom of the giant bin or are accidently inhaled by carpet mites. Which is not so bad, because they're not good for building anything but a V-19 Torrent anyway. There was some token effort to keep the TIE fighter pieces separate from the general population after that came apart, but it didn't last. Then there was kind of a vague "Star Wars Legos here, everything else there" system, with a one-pint container holding the smallest pieces (about nine hundred fifty thousand of them). Now everything, from the most basic red 2 x 4 brick to the eight hundred separate pieces of the composite universal joint hinge assembly for a V-19 Torrent, is all commingled together in what amounts to 31 quarts of solid plastic hurl. So what ends up happening is that Lego time slips by without having actually completed anything. Much like the way the time I was planning to write this entry in did the exact same thing. Time to clean up the mess I've made in the living room and get back to this later in the week. posted by M. Giant 7:09 AM 5 comments 5 Comments:I feel your pain on this exact issue. I have a husband who buys lego sets for 8 and up for a 3 and 5 year old. Needless to say, they don't stay together long. I've decided the only thing to do with the 'leftovers' as i call them is to issue challenges such as 'build an airplane' for a prize. It gets them using the bricks creatively and not stressing me out. Its generally understood that these things never go back together as hard as I might try. A month ago, I tried rebuilding an airport. It was so annoying.
By Lego Time over and nothing finished. Kid'll never get into Harvard at that rate.
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This is a long story, but I think you will relate (and perhaps be horrified).
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Don't forget the great joy of stepping on the stray pieces in your bare feet. I have no idea how a tiny molded piece of plastic manages to send waves of pain all the way up a spinal cord, but it does. Those Legos are versatile.
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UberLegoGeek Warning!
By Wednesday, March 03, 2010 Use the Fork, Luke Our friend CorpKitten sent M. Edium a couple of gifts a while back. One was The Star Wars Cookbook. The other was The Star Wars Cookbook II. Despite the latter's focus on long-forgotten characters from The Phantom Menace (unless you remember Sio Bibble, in which case: nerd), they are both awesome. The photography is quite entertaining, there are some funny stickers in the back (including one I stole the title of this entry from) and all the recipes we have tried are excellent. The book is aimed at kids, of course, and is a great way to get them interested in cooking. We have no complaints. It's just that M. Edium won't eat any of the food we've made out of it. It started with the TIE Fighter Ties. These are basically half-wieners with canned croissant dough wrapped around them in a vague solar panel shape. Looked great on paper, and tasted great to me. But after Trash had spent the better part of an hour first constructing and then baking a whole fleet of them, it was a little disheartening to see M. Edium strip off the breading and just eat the hot dogs naked. Kind of made her feel like she'd wasted 43 minutes. We thought the Jabba Jiggle would be a success, as it's simply multicolored layers of JELL-O with fruit in it, and he likes both JELL-O and fruit. Yes, we had to use up three boxes to make it, but we figured he would get through most of it over the next few days. A week later, he'd eaten half a bowl. Most recently, we made the Mos Eisley Morsels, which are supposed to be spice cake topped by blobs of mashed bananas to evoke the domed architecture of Tatooine. We made carrot cake instead and offered it both with and without bananas. Trash and I ended up eating most of both. He wouldn't even dig into the Tusken Raider Taters, which are just tater tots (at least the way we made them), and they used to be one of his staple foods. Pretty much the only success as far as he's concerned has been the Darth Malt. By the time we came around to this one, we were careful to warn him that whatever the accompanying photo might indicate, the end product would not include an Obi-Wan Kenobi action figure dangling inside the cup. I don't think he believed us, and I think he was still disappointed, but even he couldn't resist a chocolate milkshake with Whoppers chopped up in it. Anyway, after the rejection of the R2-D2 Treats (chopped peanuts and melted white chocolate molded over a frozen half-banana with Kit Kat halves glommed onto the sides in a shape reminiscent of an astromech droid), we got the message. At this point, I'd be afraid to even offer him plain old blue milk. It's clearly all about the presentation. He looks at the food in the cookbooks surrounded by all the props and toys, and that's what he expects. So it's clear what we need to do, to get him not only into cooking, but into willingly eating things that aren't mac & cheese. First, our kitchen is relatively well-appointed, but it needs more action figures. Second, we need Glark to come help us cook. We'd be willing to pay in space pillows. posted by M. Giant 8:47 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:You had me at space pillows. Mmmmm space pillows.
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Have you seen this? A friend forwarded it to me this morning.
By Monday, March 01, 2010 The Block Side It's not like I have a lot of time to play video games at all these days, but I've given Grand Theft Auto 3 a rest. Or maybe it's given one to me. Until I get better at gunfighting, downgrading my wanted level, or picking up bundles of porno magazines, I'm pretty much stuck. Enter Lego Star Wars II. Unlike GTA3, this is a game I can play with M. Edium. Because of how it's And in some ways, the game is better than the movies. There's no lame dialogue; instead, the characters, when they need to communicate with each other during the cutscenes, simply mime and grunt at each other Miss Othmar-like. And there's a lot more slapstick comedy, like the bit with Luke's new hand at the end of Episode V running amok aboard the medical frigate. Hilarious! So obviously it's a lot different from the last Star Wars game I played. The biggest drawback so far is that there doesn't seem to be a way to save your progress in the middle of a level. Whose idea was it to design a game for kids that can only be played in one-hour chunks? And in fact it can be longer when the kid in the partnership keeps getting lost, stuck, and/or disassembled. Whereas when I'm playing GTA3 and I need to quit, I can usually quit instantly without losing any progress because I generally haven't made any. So I also play it when he's asleep. It's a different experience then. The game goes more smoothly, and you have a chance of actually reaching the goal number of those tiny little round Lego buttons you're supposed to collect in each level, the ones that in real life just end up inside the vacuum cleaner. In fact, sometimes Chao and I play it on nights when he's over. M. Edium might give us an assignment to work on -- complete this level, or defeat that enemy -- and then it's up to us to make that happen. Which we then do. Of course, it's not like he ever checks our progress or even asks the next morning, so we could play the Shaun White snowboarding game on the Wii instead and he'd never know the difference. But that game makes us all sweaty anyway. If I find myself with a spare hour, I tell Trash that I'm playing "M. Edium's" Lego Star Wars game for his benefit. I'm just trying to unlock more features, characters, and cheats for him so he can enjoy the experience more in our next bi-monthly game session. It's all about the boy, really. The things I do for that child. posted by M. Giant 8:19 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:
I'm glad I'm not the only one who does this! I spent 3 hours and got a blister on my thumb trying to finish a level on Super Mario Wii!
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I did the same thing with Viva Pinata - was playing all night with our newborn, so that our toddler would have more progress the next day!
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