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, August 31, 2010 Road Trip Day 9: E-Town Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Cameron Crowe's male protagonists can't handle failure. Like, at all. Lloyd Dobler gets dumped by his girlfriend and turns into a creepy, if admittedly iconic, stalker. Campbell Scott in Singles gets his pet project (which was dumb to begin with) shot down and he not only walks off the job, he literally demolishes his cubicle on the way, then morphs into a housebound waste of carbon. That nerdy kid in Almost Famous lets a setback in his journalistic career -- when he's a teenager, mind you, and has plenty of time to recover -- override all the cool, unique experiences he had along the way, to the point where he barricades himself in his bedroom. And of course, most recently, there's Orlando Bloom in Elizabethtown, who's so crushed by one professional faceplant that he attempts suicide. What is it about all these guys that one kick in the chops sends them into a near-hopeless spiral of despair so deep that the only thing that can rescue them is the even greater need of someone else? This of course raises the question of what Cameron Crowe's been up to ever since the aforementioned Elizabethtown, a widely panned flop. Well, if he's anything like the characters he's created, it's not so much a question as a certainty -- he's moping around inconsolably, making everyone miserable. There hasn't been a new Heart album in years because Nancy Wilson has been too busy holding her husband's hair while he throws up and thinking, Dammit, I should have seen this coming. I haven't seen Elizabethtown, but as of our road trip this summer, I have seen Elizabethtown, or "E-Town" as the locals call it. From what I'm to understand, the movie version of the town is a magical place, full of quirky characters. I don't see how any of its real-life residents could be that quirky, given that it's practically impossible to find a damn cup of coffee there. We spend most of the next two days at the home of our host, which is set on a hillside in exactly how you imagine rural Kentucky -- long, horizontal-plank fences bisecting rolling green hills. M. Edium alternates between swimming in the pool and going on hunts to pick up clover for Houdini the rabbit. It's the third of July, so in the evening, we light off the Super Finger-Fragging Fun-Pak collection of Target fireworks we've been toting all over the country in the back yard, in a spot set aside for that purpose. You can tell because it looks like a very small rocket landed there once. We'll have to leave before dark, so it's not as spectacular as we might have hoped, but some sights don't require a lot of sparks to generate entertainment.  Update: Thanks to Alex for pointing out that there's a new Heart album out. I knew I should have posted this entry earlier. posted by M. Giant 2:46 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:Heart just released a new album this week!
By To be fair to the character in Almost Famous he was a teenager, when everything does seem a lot more black and white, and one failure can doom you forever (see also: SAT score).
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Wait -- Heart's still around?
By Sunday, August 29, 2010 Road Trip Day 8: E-Ticket Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 For the second day in a row we have breakfast at Waffle House. M. Edium loves Waffle House. He would eat there every day if we had them at home. Trash is still not tired of the ubiquity of another restaurant chain here in the south, and I have realized that if it were possible for her to get tired of Sonic cherry limeade, it would have happened by now. Today's is a fairly short drive, from central Tennessee to central Kentucky. We expect to be at our destination by early afternoon, even with the time change stealing an hour away from us. That means we have time to stop at Dinosaur World, which might be best described as Jurassic Park hit by a freeze ray.    Even after stopping for an hour or so, we get to the RV Park in Elizabethtown not long after noon. A friend of Trash's lives about a half hour away. Unfortunately, we end up driving in late after all, because M. Edium spends most of that half hour in the bathroom. But eventually we get there, meet their pet bunny named Houdini, and I finish my weecap while M. Edium kicks off what will end up being, more or less, three solid days in their pool. Longstanding rules regarding blogging about one's job -- or that of one's spouse -- prevent me from going into much detail, but I can say a lovely time was had by all. In fact, driving back to the cabin that night is the one time on the whole trip that M. Edium actually falls asleep on the road. Speaking of the cabin, this is the kind of place I had expected us to be in the whole trip: one room, one light, two beds, no bathroom. There's no TV and no refrigerator, but our hosts make us a generous offer -- if we want to bring in a TV and a refrigerator, we should feel free to plug them in. There's not even a doorknob -- after disengaging the deadbolt, you open the door by tugging on a little rope that hangs outside the door, and which lifts the door's inner crossbar up. Rustic is a word that comes to mind. So is primitive. It's cute, but none of us can get too heartbroken that we're hardly going to be spending any time in it awake. posted by M. Giant 8:32 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:If you ever get out to the Palm Springs area, there are several giant dinosaurs just off I-10 (as seen in Pee Wee's Big Adventure). They used to be the only things around sticking up out of the desert, but a Burger King and various gas stations have popped up around them. It makes for a pretty cool rest stop, and you can go up inside one of the dinos where there is a gift shop.
By Wednesday, August 25, 2010 Showered with Good Fortune I'm not the kind of person who habitually makes myself feel better because of someone else's mistakes. It just worked out that way. It happened when I was replacing the shower surround in the downstairs bathroom. The old one, which my dad and I installed the first year we lived here, was starting to yellow with age. But we had a new one in the garage that I'd bought last winter, and I wanted to get it in place before it did the same. Tearing down the old one was surprisingly easy, and despite the grim condition of the caulking, there was no water damage behind it. The back panel stuck easily to the sheetrock. So did one of the end panels. It was the panel for the end with the plumbing where I ran into trouble. First, I couldn't get the handles off. Until I did. Turns out they were just stuck. The tub faucet, however, was even stucker. I knew it would twist off if I applied enough leverage and force. The question was whether I'd be able to twist it back on again, or if I'd have to fill the tub for M. Edium's future baths out of a broken, Hulked-off stump. Once I got that off, it was a question of marking the places on the new panel where the fixtures poked through. I suppose I could have just cut the whole bottom third off the panel, but I don't want to end up on There I Fixed It. Unless it's on purpose. The instructions advise you to use the cardboard box as a template. Which I did, holding it up to where the new panel would be and marking the openings for the fixtures. Then I brought my template outside and laid it down on top of the panel that would go there, and went to work with my new holesaw drill attachment. This is when I learned that I am not good with holesaws. I would have had better results gnawing through the plastic. But, I thought, at least it was the back of the panel that was all scratched up and not the front, right? Right. And hopefully the escutcheons would hide the worst of the gouges. Except I'd put my template down backwards. And the plumbing fixtures aren't centered on that wall. So the only way the new panel would fit now would be inside out. With, as a bonus, all of the horrible holesaw damage showing. I hate screwing up projects like this, because I know I'm going to see the mistake until it either gets fixed again, years down the road, or until we move out. At which point we'll have to fix it. But there was more bad news. The surround kit also came with two corner panels, which is where the shelves were. And this one came with two left panels. Which, given the number of left hands I appeared to have this particular weekend, was appropriate. I was going to go ahead and glue the panel in upside down, because at this point why the hell not, but then Trash got the idea of calling the home improvement store where we got it to complain. At first it looked like we were out of luck, because Home Depot didn't seem to carry that kit any more. But then I told her that I got it at Menards, so we were back on track. Sure enough, she got the go-ahead for us to bring it in, and I stuck the balky panel -- liberally spooged with still-tacky adhesive -- in the back of the station wagon and drove to the hardware store. They were very nice about it, apologizing for my inconvenience and saying the faulty kit would be sent back to the manufacturer. They guy got up on one of those motorized ladders and hauled down a fresh kit, which he opened and from which he presented me with a correct right-corner panel. "You know," I said insinuatingly as per the plan Trash and I had formulated, "as long as you have that open…" And that was how I came to return home with a fresh, unblemished shower panel to replace the one I'd wrecked. And one other thing: a holesaw guide. Turns out you need one of those if you don't want your hole to look like it was made by a beaver with vertigo. From there, it was smooth sailing. I was able to attach all five panels, one with correctly drilled holes. I admired my handiwork for a long time. After all, I was going to have to start caulking soon, and I just knew I was going to screw that up. posted by M. Giant 4:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, August 23, 2010 Rock Camp for Dads Do you have plans this Sunday? I do. Here they are:  Yes, I've blown the dust off my bass guitar. Or, more accurately, I've rocked it off. Five formerly aspiring and currently aging rock musicians, including myself, have gotten together as part of a program called Rock Camp for Dads. Every Tuesday night in August, we've been meeting for jam sessions, putting together a short set of songs. How short? So short you could come check us out and barely make a dent in your Sunday afternoon. So mark your calendars, book your plane flights, petition your parole board, whatever you need to do to get to Famous Dave's in Uptown Minneapolis (specifically, Calhoun Square at Lake Street and Hennepin Avenue. We'll see you there! Assuming we remember our bifocals, that is. posted by M. Giant 8:54 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, August 20, 2010 Private M. Thursday nights are a little crazy around our house this month. Trash is an adjunct professor at a local university, teaching an online university class to the next generation of researchers. And I'm weecapping Big Brother. Since both of these activities are of roughly equal importance to society, what is to be done with M. Edium? Well, the other night, he spent part of the evening with our neighbors up the street. They have a daughter and son one and two years younger than M. Edium, respectively, and the three of them are great friends (much as their parents have become in the past year). During this visit, the kids wanted to play with the toy coffee maker, but the toy coffee pot was missing, and apparently has been for some time. M. Edium suggested using a glass or a bowl in its place, but their mom explained that they're not allowed to play with the toy at all until they find the missing piece. A perfectly reasonable incentive to encourage the kids to quit losing their shit all the goddamn time, in other words. Other kids might whine. Other kids might forget about it and move on. Our kid reached into his pocket and handed her his business card, which reads, in part: [M. Edium] Detective "I can help you with that problem," he said. Yes, this really happened. In order for you to believe me, I can see that I need to back up. M. Edium this year became a fan of Jigsaw Jones mysteries, a series of hard-boiled detective novels that are similar to the old Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane tales of yore, except that the gumshoe in these stories is in second grade. After having us read a number of these books to him, M. Edium decided to become a detective himself, just like Jigsaw Jones. Jigsaw's slogan is, "For a dollar a day, we make problems go away." A slogan which M. Edium has shamelessly appropriated. Because as much as he wants to be like his literary hero, he wants to get money even more. So a few weeks ago, Trash ordered him a box of those free business cards from VistaPrint, set up an online presence for him, and he was in business as a detective. So far he's already solved two cases. One was helping Trash find her sunglasses (which, between you and me, she hadn't actually lost) and another was finding a library book (which I actually found and then all but directed him to with a Socratic barrage of rhetorical questions), and he's earned a dollar for each. But this is the first time he's been hired by someone outside the family. And I have to say, I'm impressed with his ability to drum up business. He's taking it seriously, too. He even started a detective journal like Jigsaw's. Although so far it only has a crude drawing of the missing toy coffee pot and he had to borrow the notebook from his friends' mom. I just hope I don't have to be over at the neighbors' house when he launches into his search for the kids' missing coffee pot. Some detectives in mystery novels go into some pretty dangerous places, but something tells me that one of the most dangerous places on our block is between M. Edium and a dollar. posted by M. Giant 9:14 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:That is extremely cute, M. Giant. You two are such great parents! I'm currently pregnant and reading your blog highlights all the fun stuff ahead.
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Our kid is presently quite enamored of the old Encyclopedia Brown series, which she's been reading with my husband (Encyclopedia apparently held a very special place in Daddy's heart and memory, and I enjoyed his exploits as a kid myself). I haven't heard of Jigsaw Jones, but am adding the name to our library list for this week's trip!
By Wednesday, August 18, 2010 Camping Trip-Up You know we love camping, right? We get that not everyone loves camping. It's not for everyone. As one of my coworkers said to me, "Uh, I pay a mortgage, so…" Given our two-week road trip earlier in the summer, we haven't camped out in the tent as much as usual this year. In fact, we've only done it once, the weekend before last. And on this trip, more than any other, I can see where some of the anti-camping types are coming from. I've heard all the reasons people don't like camping -- or think they won't like it -- but on this last trip, we lived them. Bugs. The minute we got out of Chao's truck at the campsite, we knew something was wrong. It wasn't even one in the afternoon, and the mosquitoes were swarming, worse than we'd ever seen them in this campground. Or indeed anywhere in the world. The collective noun for a group of mosquitoes is a swarm, right? So what's the collective noun for a group of swarms? Because we had that. I think we had a couple of them, actually. Plagues of swarms. I'm pretty sure I personally killed more than a hundred of them in the forty-odd hours we were there. It didn't even help. Not even leaving their corpses stuck to my skin with their little probosci still sunk deep in my flesh as a warning to the others seemed to help. And then when I was all furry with them, Trash didn't want to hug me. There were also spiders, but you'd be amazed at how friendly toward spiders you can get when there are that many mosquitoes. Extreme temperatures. Making things worse was the fact that the days were hot and windless, so it was too uncomfortable to wear a beekeeper's suit against the bugs. And it got really cold the first night, which must have been why Trash needed the entire sleeping bag. Fear of getting stranded in the middle of nowhere. Chao's truck served us well, but we were camping with my brother-in-law, his wife, and their daughter Deniece (now eight-and-a-half), who were using her dad's RV to see if it would be feasible drive it to Yellowstone next month. I'm not going to get into how much time my BIL spent arguing with the RV's batteries, alternator, and jumper cables, or how many times we had to stop on the 150-mile drive back to give the RV enough juice to cover just half of the remaining distance home, but suffice it to say that my BIL's family had other vacation plans by the time the weekend was over. Being expected to go fishing. I didn't go fishing. I don't fish. I know less about fishing than you do, and I'm not talking to any person reading this, I'm talking to their Internet routers. And yet I got nominated to buy all the bait and tackle anyway. Rain. In a tent, at two in the morning, it's easy to play that game where you count the seconds between the lightning flashes and the thunderclaps to determine whether the storm is getting closer or further. At least, it's easy when there is a gap between lightning flashes and thunderclaps. A bit later, when the machine-gunning of raindrops on the micron of synthetic fabric protecting you from the elements turns into antiaircraft fire and the puddles on the plastic floor are slowly spreading and you're looking at the sodden nylon over your head that makes you curse yourself for not securing the rain-fly better, you find yourself thinking about those campers who died in flash-flooding in Arkansas and you realize something: tents don't have ejection seats. We could make a dash for the RV, but it's coming down so hard we'd get too soaked to make it worth it. Fortunately M. Edium is already sleeping in there with his aunt, uncle, and cousin, so if lighting hits the tent and fries us there'll be someone to carry on the family name. We're up with the anemic sun the next morning, and are in such a hurry to stuff all our sodden gear into the truck (and to get away from the mosquitoes, which were not only not cleared out by the rain but are now traveling in curtains) that we're out of there in half an hour. Last night, we'd taken down the screen gazebo over the picnic table in order to save time packing this morning, and it worked -- there's a lot of stuff we now have to throw away rather than pack up. Then we get home and everything has to be quickly unpacked, run through the laundry, and/or spread out on the ground to be dried by the sun (because of course the rainstorm that made our night and morning miserable did nothing for our lawn or garden here at home). The sodden tent and screen gazebo are set up again in the yard so they don't mildew in their bags between now and whenever the next camping trip is, and the roof of a car turns out to be the perfect-sized drying rack for a sleeping bag. The tarps dry fastest, of course. That is, the tarp we brought home. We abandoned two of them at the campsite because they had become folding ponds. I'm sure someone else will enjoy them. It's like all the work of two camping trips with the fun of one! Wild Animals. At some point during the Blair Witch hours of the morning between the end of the rainstorm and the sunrise, something's outside our tent. It's quiet, but I know it's there because something distinctly muzzle-shaped is pressing inward on the tent wall that's two feet from Trash's face. This is not an errant leaf or branch blowing past -- this is something that wants in. The good news is that whatever it is, it's very low to the ground. "It's a chipmunk," I tell Trash optimistically, trying to think of the cutest, most harmless thing it could be. Trash is not convinced, and bops the nose with her Maglite. It goes away -- the second time she does it. We figure it was a raccoon, or maybe just another camper's escaped dog. Probably not a badger. Or a wolverine. Just something that didn't like the mosquitoes any more than we did. A harmless little grizzly bear, maybe. So I realize that this post isn't going to convince anybody whot's skeptical about camping, but we actually did have a fun time, despite being coated in enough DEET to poison a moose. But I will make one small confession: We're looking into buying a used camper pop-up trailer. posted by M. Giant 9:16 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:You know, the thing is, you somehow have that aura of being a guy who would know his way around a tackle box. I THINK that's a compliment. Let's just say that it is a compliment.
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I will loudly and willingly admit that I am one who falls staunchly into the "not into camping" camp.
By @Weet - I'll take it as a compliment. I try to have the aura of knowing my way around a lot of things. It's a lot less time-consuming than actually knowing my way around them.
By Monday, August 16, 2010 Road Trip Day 7: Music City Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Today was going to be our tourist-y day in Nashville, but after almost a week of traveling, there's a certain tendency for us to just want to hibernate at the RV park for a day. So instead of venturing out to visit the Grand Ole Opry and the Ryman Auditorium, we're taking it easy. We're just going to see a bunch of other stuff instead. First on the list is the Parthenon. Yes, Nashville has a full-sized replica of the Parthenon. We wish to compare it to the one in Athens, which we saw when we visited Greece years ago. I would have to say that on balance, this one is in better shape. It's part of Centennial Park, which was built in 1897 to celebrate the centennial of Nashville's founding (which was actually in 1796, but who among us hasn't missed the odd deadline?) The main hall inside is dominated by a giant statue of the goddess Athena. The lower floors are mostly a museum about the building of the Parthenon, which kind of makes me wonder what was in there when it first opened 113 years ago. But back then, there was also an Egyptian pyramid right next door, so maybe this place didn't get as much attention. From there we head to one of Nashville's plantations, because Trash wants to get a little history. We arrive just as a tour group is leaving, and the next one doesn't start for another hour. Rather than waiting around for an hour, we decide to go to another plantation. We also miss the tour group there, and learn that we will have to wait an hour and half for that one. We spend some money at the gift shop and decide that plantation tours are overrated. The rest of the day is spent in the pool, and at dinner I make some mac & cheese on the camp stove (the one time its three cubic feet get used for anything but ballast on this trip) and grill some turkey-burgers over charcoal. While I'm doing this, the singer is setting up in the front yard of our cabin. Yes, this RV park is the location for a free country music concert every Thursday in the summer. The show starts around seven P.M., and consists of what amounts to a professional karaoke singer performing country standards and talking a lot in between them. He can carry a tune, and he's got the style down, but I can't help thinking that I'm essentially watching a professional karaoke performance. I have to bail on the concert after the first hour, because Burn Notice is on at eight and I have to watch it in our cabin. Since the advent of weecapping at TWoP, I have become even more dependent on our DVR than I was with full-length recapping. Writing a weecap is almost like a slow-motion liveblog, where you occasionally pause to get something down and maybe rewind a few times to capture a choice bit of dialogue. It turns out to be something that's devilishly hard to do in real time. It proves even harder when there's a professional karaoke concert going on right outside your window. It's even more difficult when an increasingly tired five-year-old keeps opening the front door to go in and out, especially during the part where the singer's louder wife gets drafted into taking over the microphone. If I didn't know I'd have access to a DVR recording of this tomorrow, I might begin to feel frustrated. Both shows are scheduled to end at 9:00, but only mine does. The one outside drags on until 9:45, by which time M. Edium is so exhausted (not that he could sleep anyway), that he's crying like a contestant on America's Next Top Model. By the time an RV pulls up next to our cabin at 11:00 and disgorges a number of people that Trash conservatively estimates as seventeen -- all of them noisy -- we're too tired to care. Or at least I am. posted by M. Giant 6:58 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, August 13, 2010 Road Trip Day 6: Crashville to Nashville Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 As if the alpine setting of our cabin weren't vertigo-inducing enough, the beds in here are even higher. Trash has to sort of lean her torso over it and then swing her legs up to get into ours. M. Edium's single bed is a little lower, but it's still about shoulder height. Which is probably why he hurts himself rolling out of it some time between one and two in the morning. It takes a while to stop the bleeding, and even longer to stop the crying, but eventually everyone calms down. We drag the mattress off the bed so he can sleep the rest of the night a little closer to the floor, which pretty much uses up the rest of the available floor space in the cabin. Probably just as well that we're leaving in the morning. * * * This being the furthest point in this particular trip, we essentially start heading home today. We pack our stuff and our battered-faced child into the pickup, stop for breakfast at Sonic (Sonics are everywhere down here, as opposed to a twenty-minute drive away at home), and hit the road. This is going to be a fairly easy day of driving, as we're only a few hours from Nashville, where we'll be spending the next two nights. Actually, the part where we drive through Nashville itself isn't all that easy. The GPS keeps wanting me to enter and exit various freeways, and it's not until after the eighth interchange or so that it's just giving me shortcuts that I could be doing just as well without. The RV park we're staying at is actually north of the city. When Trash booked it, they told her that it's no uncommon for country musicians to hang out there. Not that I know all that much about country music, but that young blonde woman at the pool seemed to be some kind of minor local celebrity, from the way other people were treating her. If only I could recall her name. Tyler Speedy, or something like that. Our cabin is more like what we used to have when we stayed in the Black Hills last fall; a one-bedroom A-frame with a front porch. Except this is better, because it also has a refrigerator, cable TV, and a cavernous bathroom grafted onto the back that's the entire width of the structure. It's simple and yet luxurious. Except I wish I hadn't parked the pickup right alongside it, because every time I come around that way I bang my head on the roof overhang. M. Edium and I spend most of the afternoon in the pool. Back at Jellystone, Trash had told me to quit floating him around like a pool toy and make him practice some of his actual swimming skills. Which, after an afternoon of practicing, he starts to actually have. Dinner is some authentic Tennessee barbecue. We can tell it's authentic because we have to drive a half hour to an industrial area, pick it up from a place that doesn't have anywhere to sit down, and drive a half hour back to eat it at the picnic table outside our cabin. And also because it comes with a sack of grocery-store hamburger buns. Oh, and a bee stings me on the eyebrow for no reason. That might bother me more if we weren't having such a good time. posted by M. Giant 7:45 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Your trip sounds fabulous. Except for the bee sting... but better you than Trash!
By Tuesday, August 10, 2010 M. Ovie Reviews: Dinner for Schmucks Go see Dinner for Schmucks! You will learn an important lesson, which is that it is wrong to laugh at stupid people. And for that reason, you should not go see Dinner for Schmucks. Yes, I laughed at this movie, because it had a lot of decent jokes and strong performances throughout the whole cast (if it had been made five or six years ago, the leads would have been Ben Stiller and Mike Myers, right?). But I'm having a little trouble untangling the Möbius strip of hypocrisy that is the movie's message. Okay, you know I try to keep these spoiler free, but you already know from the trailers that the only thing standing between Tim (Paul Rudd) and a big promotion is his participation in a dinner whose purpose is to mock morons. Alas, his short-fused girlfriend violently disapproves of the idea. But when he runs into Michael Scott's brain-damaged twin Barry Speck, how is that anything but a sign from God that he's supposed to go through with it? You also know from the trailers that Tim's life rapidly becomes a cascading series of disasters as a result. And although this last bit isn't in the trailers, you know from every other movie you've ever seen that Tim will discover the truth: the real schmuck is Tim. But let's take this a step further. If Tim's a schmuck for being even reluctantly willing to participate in exchange for a big promotion (which he sees as the key to a better life and the love of his girl), what does that say about those of us who paid to be in on it? Doesn't that make us even worse than Tim? The movie also stacks the deck by making most of the schmucks not all that bad. Barry, while clueless and prone to spectacularly bad decisions, is an almost complete innocent whose actions are 97% driven by good intentions. Plus he has talent, even if it's a weird talent. In fact, all the other schmucks invited to the climactic dinner (which takes so much of the movie to get to that I was actually getting hungry) got there because they have some unusual talent, aspiration, or love. None of the alleged idiots is just coasting through life or pissing away their potential. Well, except maybe some of the people who invited them, but that's kind of the point. So Dinner for Schmucks's mission is twofold: to make you laugh at idiots, and then make you feel bad about it. For me, at least, it succeeded at the first part. But I'm not about to start feeling guilty for making fun of morons, because the money I earn from doing so helps support my family. And furthermore, we're not even halfway through this season of Big Brother yet. posted by M. Giant 11:14 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, August 05, 2010 Road Trip Day 5: Far, Far Away Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 We're running out of space centers to take M. Edium to. He's already been to Kennedy and Johnson, and today he's going to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, where they used to build the Space Shuttle. That right there is excitement enough, even as we spend several months gently breaking the "used to" part to him. Kid still thinks he's going to grow up to fly one, after all. But it's even better today, because there's a Star Wars exhibit going on in the museum all this summer. This is one of the high points of the trip, as it would be for any Star Wars fan. And M. Edium is pretty excited about it too. As she decided yesterday, Trash stays behind to work in the cabin. Which is her loss, but also ours, because if she had come along, she probably would have stopped me from parking way on the wrong end of the complex. We park outside Space Camp (which he is still too young to attend, because there's no justice in the world), which means a long-ass walk. Inside the front entrance, a Space Center employee checks our "tickets" for the Star Wars exhibit (actually an e-mail), marks them with a highlighter, and sends us on our way, following C-3PO's "footprints." I'm no expert tracker, but if those are his actual footprints, his finish is coming off at an alarming rate. But at least he's making up for it by taking up traveling in ten-foot bounds. We're allowed into the exhibit hall, which is more or less as different as what we saw in Houston could possibly be and still be related to Star Wars. Whereas that was essentially a Clone Wars-branded playground, this is an actual museum exhibit. One of the first things you see is the original four-foot-long, seventy-pound model of the Millennium Falcon they used in the first film. It's like being in the presence of a holy relic. But that's just the beginning. Everything from a star destroyer to a podracer is here, even if it is a little distressing to see that most of them are actually about the same size. There's also the actual Luke Skywalker's landspeeder vehicle. You could hop right into it if you wanted, and didn't mind hurdling the ropes and getting arrested and probably getting every piece of Star Wars merchandise you own repossessed. Enhancing the experience is the fact that every exhibit is accompanied by a video monitor with a small menu of educational clips you can watch. This is even more of a bonus for M. Edium, because many of these clips feature original Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt. Who also happens to be the voice of WALL-E, which in M. Edium's world makes him a minor deity. And perhaps not even that minor. Which makes it extra surprising that M. Edium seems to want to rush through the exhibit hall and get to the next thing. Soon it becomes a full-time job for me to chase him away from the exit, from saying "Look at this!" with increasing desperation, to physically carrying him away from the door. It's making it rather difficult for me to take as many crappy cell phone pictures as I'd hoped. I don't know what it is he's so keen to get to, but I'll soon learn. The problem is that tickets are sold for specific times, so once you leave the exhibit hall, you can't get back in. But leave we do, and I discover what was making that irresistible siren call that only he could hear: the gift shop. Should have known. We spend almost as much time in there looking through cheap crap as we did looking through the priceless artifacts in the other room, and he ultimately settles on a plush Boba Fett toy to join the other stuffed friends that he's brought along on this trip (now 14 of them, and we do a census of them every time we pack up). Then we have lunch and go back to the cabin to meet Trash before the afternoon is half over. "So what did you see? What did you learn?" she asks us. We excitedly tell her about all the costumes and props, and how computer-controlled cameras were originally invented for Star Wars adapting technology that was used to manufacture wooden millwork. "But what did you learn about the space program?" "…" M. Edium says. "We saw a Saturn V," I offer. See, I told you it would have been better if she'd been along. posted by M. Giant 6:44 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, August 03, 2010 Road Trip Day 4: On the Hunt Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day four was going to be another big driving day. We spent most of it skimming east along the top of northern Mississippi, which as it turns out is not particularly wide. Or maybe it's just that a lot of it is filled with kudzu. It's strange for us to be going east this much, this early in the road trip. Normally we don't head east until we're on our way back. My sense of direction, normally fairly reliable, keeps trying to convince me that we're going in some non-Euclidean version of west-north-south. I have to keep checking the GPS and the digital compass in the rearview mirror to assure myself that we're going the right way. I don't know how we could have made this trip without electronic assistance. We'd have either come back a week early or still be out there. We cross into Alabama (another new state for everyone in the car), which at this latitude looks a lot like Mississippi did at this latitude. That is, until the freeway starts getting wider about halfway across, and an unmistakable landmark becomes visible from several miles away. It's a full-sized Saturn V rocket, standing erect outside the U.S. Rocket and Space Center and Space Camp. This is actually the third Saturn V rocket M. Edium has seen in person, but the other two were housed inside buildings, mounted horizontally so you can walk their length. Seeing one towering over the landscape like this is enough to give any space geek a sympathetic boner. It's too late in the afternoon to head inside today, and our tickets are for tomorrow anyway. So we head on past, through the city to the foot of the Monte Sano mountains. And then right up into them. Our billet for tonight is a cabin in Monte Sano State Park, so we're really not expecting much in this cabin at all. And yet, there it is -- a complete kitchen with a full-sized fridge. But that's not all, because the view from right next to the cabin is a spectacular vista, all of northern Alabama laid out in the valley below us, with ridges fading off into the distance. Or possibly Tennessee. That's also our view from the window inside the cabin, but I didn't want to brag. Trash loved this cabin so much she immediately decided to bail on the next day's outing and hang around here to work instead. Which she was thinking about doing anyway, because she kind of had to, but now she was done feeling bad about it. As for me, despite the view I found it a little cramped and dark, and when Trash gushed that she could live here, I thought to myself, Well, that's because you're smaller than me. When darkness comes (almost an hour earlier than at home, probably because of our lower latitude and the fact that we're almost in the Eastern time zone), we look down in the valley. The city has turned into a sprinkling of stars in the bottom of a black bowl. Are some of those stars moving? No, those are the fireflies. Win. posted by M. Giant 6:21 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:Oh, how embarrassing! All the years I've been reading this site and you finally come to my town...in the middle of a horrid heat wave. Have a great, safe rest of the trip!
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