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, May 31, 2011 World's Largest One thing we've tried hardest to teach M. Edium is that he's not going to get what he wants by throwing tantrums or having meltdowns. If anything, it controls our behavior by forcing us to do the opposite of what he wants. Fortunately it doesn't happen very often. And he's learned that the best way to change our minds is to make us laugh instead. That totally works. Anyway, when we were in Orlando a couple of weeks ago, he wasn't that interested in Disney World or Sea World or Universal Studios or anything like that. But among the tourist brochures on the rack in the hotel was one for the World's Largest McDonald's, right there in Orlando. M. Edium was sold. Looking at the map on the brochure, I got the impression that it was pretty close to our hotel, and thought it would just be a short cab ride there. So I was a little embarrassed when we showed up with twenty bucks on the meter. Good thing we were having dinner at McDonald's, so at least the food would be cheap. M. Edium loves McDonald's, but he also loved everything non-McDonald's about this place, from the full deli menu (not that he took advantage of it), to the giant fish tanks we ate our dinner in front of, to the giant creepy animatronic piano-playing moon-faced dude from the 80s McDonald's commercials to the Chuck E. Cheese-style game arcade, complete with ticket dispensers and a little room where you go to redeem the tickets for what ends up translating into being ridiculously overpriced crap. M. Edium had only played a few of the games before he visited this room and saw a few Pokémon mini-plushes, which he wanted to adopt with the same passion that has forced me to ban Trash from pet stores. It could be had for the low, low price of 640 tickets. Which, given the rate at which he was earning them (he's not so great at thee games), would translate to approximately one-point-seven car payments. I got him out of the room and tried to distract him by cutting him loose in the giant child-Habitrail, but he was both adamant and inconsolable. "I'm going to win enough tickets for that if it takes me all night," he vowed. I told him that it would, but that wasn't an option. I could tell this was going to get ugly, but I wasn't sure this was the hill I wanted to die on. At least not on vacation. This wasn't just about getting a new toy. This was about rescuing a sentient being from a noisy, tropical purgatory. Fortunately, I saw an out. Unlike at most of these kinds of places, you can also buy the prizes outright for a number of pennies equal to the number of tickets they cost. I proposed this option to M. Edium: "What if we didn't spend all night earning tickets and we just bought the Pokémon?" Through his tears, M. Edium said, "That would make it seem cheap." Bless you, kid. By cracking me up, you allowed me to make this a win-win situation. He didn't have enough tickets to earn the prize he wanted, but the eleven he was able to contribute seemed to satisfy him. On our twenty-dollar cab ride home (seriously, round-trip cab fare plus tip on this outing ended up being almost as much as I paid for the rental car the next day), he told me all about Turtwig's powers or whatever. It's a turtle with a twig on its head, I don't know. But Turtwig became M. Edium's favorite "friend" for the whole rest of the trip. It even got to go with him to the Kennedy Space Center, in favor of "Shuttle" (a stuffed space shuttle with stuffed external fuel tank and stuffed SRBs) getting to return to his native home. Turtwig was adopted into the elite corps of stuffed friends who had gotten to come along on the trip, but M. Edium couldn't wait to introduce him to the rest of the family when we got home. So of course we ended up leaving it in the hotel room. The good news is that M. Edium is not unaccustomed to having his "friends" occasionally return from vacation a day or two after he does. And he doesn't ever have to know that this time, Turtwig didn't come from our Orlando hotel, but from Amazon. I just hope he doesn't find the spare that I also ordered. posted by M. Giant 9:18 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Hee! at a stuffed shuttle. Like M.Edium and hundreds of other kids, I was quite prone to leaving my stuff behind in hotel rooms. We didn't always get it back, though!
By Wednesday, May 25, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: The Adjustment Bureau On Saturday night, when the world failed to end on schedule as it always does, I went to see The Adjustment Bureau. Everyone was still on earth and The Adjustment Bureau was still in theaters. It was a night of unexpected wonders. I actually liked it more than I expected to. You're probably familiar with the premise: an everyman shoo-in New York senatorial candidate played by Matt Damon runs afoul of behatted agents of varying sinisterness, who are bent on keeping him from dating Emily Blunt. Most of us don't require shadowy figures with mysterious agendas to prevent us from dating Emily Blunt, so maybe Matt Damon isn't such an everyman after all. The film is at its best when it keeps things mysterious. It has an unfortunate tendency to overexplain things here and there, especially at the end, but it does so in a way that still allows the story to hold together. It's surprisingly tight, considering that much of it is built on the conceit of how little we really know. At some point, it becomes rather an interesting discussion about the tension between free will and predestination, although in the world of the film, predestination takes the form of the "Plan," a word you can almost hear capitalized every time someone says it. Obviously we know which side is going to win, this being a Hollywood movie and all. There's even a pivotal decision made at the literal base of the Statue of Liberty. I think that's only because they couldn't set that scene on her actual nose. The Plan is illustrated by icons representing people that move across the pages of animated books. Which is a little anachronistic. After all, aside from the ubiquitous hats that the Adjustment Bureaucrats are always wearing, they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their look updated. Shouldn't they have iPads by now? I can't complain over how quickly it moves, though. Not only do Matt Damon and Emily Blunt fall in love faster than any couple ever, even in the movies, but we get to proceed from the introduction of the Adjustment Bureaucrats to their complete explication in less than two hours. Compare that to the Observers on Fringe. Now, as for that free will vs. Plan question, the film does hint at some interesting things about how sometimes seemingly chance events are deliberately triggered by Adjustment Bureaucrats as part of the Plan. Any movie like this has to make you speculate, "Wow, what if that's true?" Unfortunately, given all the stars that have to align for any feature film to be made, it's obvious that isn't the case. There are too many places where the fiercely secretive Adjustment Bureau, if it existed, could have easily sabotaged the whole thing in order to keep their secret. The biggest twist was in the closing credits: only one milliner on the whole crew! Still, you may never look at people in hats the same way again. posted by M. Giant 11:14 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, May 23, 2011 The Question I'm always a little jealous when I see a fellow blogger getting a chance to invite his or her readers to see them at some live event, not least because who wants to go watch me blog, anyway? If I could get people to see me do that I'd be all set. I'm not to that point, but I am at the point where you can come watch me be a rock star. Twice next month, as a matter of fact. I play bass guitar in a band of fellow middle-aged rocker wannabees, and as of last month we're called The Question. What's our band called again? The Question. This is going to be a viral marketing gold mine, I can tell. Gig Number One: We're playing at a place called the Maxx Bar & Grill in Ham Lake, Minnesota on Saturday, June 4. It's our official bar gig debut (not counting the Hard Rock Café in January, that is), and we're opening for a well-established local band called Snaggletoof. If we bring in enough people, we might get to open for them again in the future, and I can nag you to come to that gig as well. Yes, it's in Ham Lake, which is way the hell up at 17646 Central Avenue. But on the other hand, we go on at 9:30, which means you have plenty of time to get there. Hell, even if you're spending that weekend up north at the cabin, you only need to come halfway back to check us out, and then you can return to the north woods with your ears still ringing. I know it seems like a long drive, but it's straight up Highway 65, the primary artery of the northern suburbs and exurbs and eventually the Iron Range. I used to live there myself. In fact, I'm sure I'll see some old neighbors there. Not that I'll recognize them because I didn't live there long enough to have met any of them. Here's the poster. Note the key words, "NO COVER."  Gig Number Two: If you've ever been to a St. Paul Saints game, you're well aware of the heady mix of minor league baseball and wacky randomness the franchise cultivates. If you haven't, you should come to the game on Friday, because we'll be playing at the tailgate party outside. This is in the more central location of Midway Stadium on Energy Park Drive in St. Pau, and if you come early enough to hear our whole set (I think the first band is starting at 5:00, although I have to confirm and get back to you), you probably won't have to walk from your car as far as you'd have to drive to the Ham Lake gig. We'll be the second of two bands playing that evening, and technically I don't think you even need to buy tickets to hear us, because we'll be playing outside the gates. So really, we're not even shaking you down for the five-dollar general admission ticket price. Come to one, come to both. And don't worry about not knowing any of our original songs, because we don't have any yet. We're still strictly a cover band, so you're bound to be familiar with at least one of our tunes, unless you've never listened to any rock music at all, in which case you probably should have stopped reading right at the beginning. Sorry I can't plug any future gigs beyond June, but if you're aware of any openings, let me know in the comments. You've always come through in the past. posted by M. Giant 7:49 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, May 18, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Bridesmaids Here's what I expected Bridesmaids to be that it wasn't: an ensemble comedy set largely in Vegas. Here's what I expected Bridesmaids to be that it was: quite funny. The ad campaign implies two hours hanging out with six mismatched women, but there really aren't that many scenes with all six of them. And it's not really about the wedding, which mostly just provides a framework for a story of a person and a friendship in crisis. I know, you're laughing already, right? The thing is, Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph are not only completely believable as lifelong best friends, they're also really funny together. There are plenty of over-the-top set pieces in this movie, but there are also some nice bits where it's just the two of them hanging out together and talking shit about people. Their relationship is complicated by the usual grown-up issues, namely Lillian (Rudolph) going off and getting married to some rich guy in Chicago while Annie (Wiig) is stuck in Milwaukee with a failed business, creepy-ass roommates, a lackluster love life, a crap job, and a car that's pretty much a running gag. At least Annie gets to be Lillian's maid of honor, but one of the other bridesmaids presents as a possible rival for not only that position but that of Lillian's best friend. So the rest of the movie is about how Annie, who's kind of awkward and goofy just as her baseline, takes that baseline further and further down in a spiral of embarrassment, ugly scene-making, and bodily fluids. I wasn't expecting Kristen Wiig to carry the whole movie the way she does, but she's quite good. After all, she looks like someone who could actually have these problems, as opposed to if this had been a different movie with Katherine Heigl or Kate Hudson, possibly denoting vulnerability by taking their hair a few shades darker. Also really good is recidivist kleptomaniac Melissa McCarthy, who used to steal all her scenes on Gilmore Girls and Samantha Who? and for all I know Mike & Molly, which I don't watch, and then she does the same thing here. She's always played characters who are sweet if a little off-kilter, but here she's playing against type as Maya Rudolph's future sister-in-law Megan. She's aggressive and butch (but straight, oh yes), and you won't believe some of what comes out of her mouth. And, in one scene, other orifices. Because this is a non-Heigl/Hudson movie in more ways than one. There's the obligatory scene where all the bridesmaids go into the dress store for the fitting and you're bracing for a musical montage of dress-trying-on, and instead we're suddenly in a full-on gross-out scene. I appreciated that quite a bit. I also appreciated that there isn't any lip-syncing until the very end, and it's funny and embarrassing instead of just embarrassing like that kind of scene usually is. I would have liked to see more of what I expected, ensemble-wise. Ellie Kemper and Wendi McLendon-Covey have a nice relationship as women on opposite ends of the innocence spectrum, but there needed to be more of that and less of Annie dealing with the two men in her life who both kind of dicks, although in different ways and to vastly different degrees. But that's quibbling. I think it's a winner. And although they're very different in most ways, this movie has two big things in common with Sucker Punch: Trash picked both for me, and they both have Jon Hamm in them. posted by M. Giant 8:19 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, May 15, 2011 Indoor Pool Part 2 Here's what you need to know about our basement. It's half finished, with the TV and the furniture and the bar and the video games on one side of a dividing wall, and the washer/dryer/laundry tub on the other side of the wall, along with the catboxes, the chest freezer, and the area under the stairs that Trash's mind gravitates to when she runs across an episode of Hoarders on TV. The floor on the finished side is carpet, with painted concrete on the unfinished side. The unfinished side is also, thank God, where all of our past basement floods have been confined to. Until now. This time, there was so much water on the floor that it was spreading out of the utility area and into the TV room, soaking the carpet -- and the area rug that we have covering part of the carpet (it sounds dumb, but it really makes it warmer down there in the winter). I knew I was going to have to deal with that, but before dealing with the width of the water, I was going to have to deal with its depth. Enter the wet-dry vacuum, called upon to live up to the first part of its name in a big way. I sucked up enough water to fill the tank and dump it out several times, and then had to stop for a while because the switch got wet and touching it started to make my hand feel really funny. Not something I wanted to do too much of while standing toenail-deep in water. Then I switched to using big plastic cups to scoop water into empty 35-pound cat litter bins. While I was doing this, I wondered when the puddle would start shrinking. We all know how tall a gallon of milk is, but how wide were the forty gallons of two-inch-deep water I'd already dumped down the laundry tub? Under the laundry tub is a floor drain, and the bubbles I saw rising from it while the laundry tub emptied gave me my answer: moot, because all the water I was dumping into the laundry tub was just ending up back on the basement floor. It was at this point I started hauling kitty-litter bins full of water upstairs, out of the house, and to the curb, where I dumped the water out for the city to pick up later. I could tell this was going to be exhausting and time-consuming even if the puddle had finally begun shrinking, but on my third or fourth trip I caught a break: the floor drain had opened up and let out most of the water's sheer depth, at least, Now instead of a lake, my basement was a swamp. Yay! But that was only the beginning of the good news. Other happy-making items included: 1. Thanks to all the basement-drying I'd done recently, there was relatively little cat litter scattered on the floor to turn into gross gray sludge like it usually does when it gets wet! 2. Because we've had a leaky basement before, most of the stuff stored on the floor is in waterproof plastic bins. They might even float if they needed to, but the water didn't get deep enough for us to find out. Maybe next time! 2. Water has never gotten into the storage area under the stairs before, which contains large cardboard boxes, our older luggage, and several guitars in cases. It did this time. Most of the bags and all the guitars were salvageable, although the suitcases now smell like unused cat litter. In fact, I discovered an acoustic six-string I didn't even know I owned. Bonus! 3. While wrestling the sodden area rug out from under the furniture and the TV room, I also found 29 cents! 4. I used to only have one or two bath towels that were dirty enough to use on the basement floor, but now I have four or five! 5. I know how much it costs to rent one of those giant, snail-shaped floor fans when I need to ($21 a day)! 6. Certain areas of the basement are now cleaner and better organized than they've been since before Christmas, thanks to all the ruined crap I had to throw away! I can laugh about it now, because my basement is dry again, and has been for weeks in a row. And it has occurred to me that we live in a world where water alarms exist and can be purchased for a lot less money than it costs to clean an area rug. posted by M. Giant 8:18 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:
Yeah, about those water alarms... We finally installed one in our basement after our third Major Flood. (Also put all the boxes/bins that weren't on shelves up on wooden pallets by that point.) Now, *one* of the two grown-ups in our house wanted to buy and install one of those spiffy water alarms after the first flood, but the *other* grown-up waited until after the third flood. Apparently it took him a lot longer to get over the fun of drying out the basement than I'd've thought it would.
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Just for your future reference (although I hope you never need to know it), a gallon of water is equal to 231 cubic inches -- that's a puddle just under 2 square feet, 1 inch deep.
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If you REALLY want to think about the bright side, you can consider that in many places in the world, that water would be better quality than the available drinking water. And that's _with_ the cat litter dissolved in it ;)
By Sunday, May 08, 2011 Indoor Pool One of the best things about working at home is that you don't have to get ready for work in the morning. You just go to work, often checking your business e-mails with eyes that aren't even fully focused yet. As the natural lulls of a normal work day come along, you might take a break to brush your teeth, or put on deodorant, or maybe shave something. If I didn't have to take M. Edium to school during the week, I'm not sure I'd even own pants. It goes without saying, then, that daily showers are a thing of my desk-bound past. As long as Trash doesn't mind my natural funk, why waste the water? I'll admit that with the decreased frequency, the length of the showers I do take can increase accordingly. It just takes a little more effort to get back to as clean as I was the last time I stepped out of the shower a month ago. Even so, I really didn't think about how much water I was using during one recent shower until I went downstairs with my dirty laundry and saw all my runoff on the basement floor. What? So, yeah, after finally dealing with the sink that kept leaking into the basement (okay, having it dealt with), I dried up yet another pool, then tried to figure out what the problem was. I turned on the tub, and the shower, both with the drain closed and the drain open, to see if I could figure out where this new leak was coming from. I was able to reproduce a slow drip from the drum drain suspended under the basement ceiling, but nothing like the deluge that the amount of water I saw on the floor would have required. But as always, I'm all about the temporary fix. I switched to showering upstairs, decided to put off calling the plumber for a few days, and left the state for my grandmother's funeral. Without going into that whole trip, I'm glad I went, even if the drive back on Tuesday through five states (if you count the hundred yards into Wisconsin) was a little on the long side. But at least I got to be home and relaxed for a few hours before I got a very urgent-sounding call from downstairs. Since Trash and Bitter were watching a DRV-delayed Glee at the time, I figured something had gone wrong with the cable. Imagine my surprise when I got downstairs and found Bitter up to the tops of her feet in water. Now, I thought I had dealt with water in the basement before. Compared to this, however, those were damp spots. Humid spells. A fogged-up hand-mirror. I came down with a bath towel and Trash just laughed at me. We realized the toilet had been running, and probably had for a while. Once we dealt with that, at least the basement ocean stopped spreading before it went completely wall to wall. And it could have been a lot worse. As it turned out, the cable and the TV and the DVR were all just fine. Which meant that Trash and Bitter were able to watch the end of Glee while sitting in the dry quarter of the basement. While I tried to figure out exactly what the hell had happened, and what the hell I was going to do about it. At the very least, I was going to need a lot of towels. posted by M. Giant 8:23 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
If your house is on the "older" side, you may need to clean out your sewer line that runs from house to street. Older mains are made from clay pipes (of all things) and tree roots frequently grow between the seams and clog up the drains, which means the waste water then backs up into the basement through the floor drain.
By Wednesday, May 04, 2011 Vanity Unfair, Part 2 I saw so many movies last month that it took me forever to get back to the story of our leaky sink and our wet basement. But that doesn't mean that story's over. Not by long, damp shot. So yes, I felt terribly clever for using Legos to tilt the vanity counter forward so that any water leaking out of the fixture would go into the sink and down the drain. The only problem with that temporary solution was that I neglected to make sure it would actually work. By raising the two back corners, I had adjusted the direction of the downhill flow forward, but hadn't neutralized the leftward slant. So the next morning when I got up, all the water had leaked from the fixture and around the basin, onto the bathroom floor, and then into the basement. So now I had two floors to dry. Stupid Legos. After cleaning up both messes, my next project was to align the sink so that leakage actually did go down the drain. Using some flatter pieces, I leveled off the left-right orientation and then dribbled some water onto the fixture so I could watch it flow straight into the sink. Which it did. Now I could relax and have time to consider my next move. Well, my second-to-next move, because my actual next move was going to be to send it to There I Fixed It. I wished the fixture would start leaking again so I could feel clever. I felt less clever the next morning, when I was in the bathroom and heard a slow dripping sound. I couldn't see it, though -- until I opened up the vanity cabinet. Which was flooded. It seemed the water that used to leak out of the fixture above the sink was now leaking out below it. Fortunately, most of the water-soluble stuff we keep in there had already been destroyed the previous summer, so that was a win. And by now I was getting really good at drying the basement floor. It was then that I finally figured out the permanent fix: turn off the water supply to the sink until the plumber came. It turned out to be a simple solution; the plumber simply replaced the faucet cartridge. I would have felt better about the bill had I not just replaced that very cartridge myself ten months before. But the good news, as always, was that I was done having to deal with ponds on the basement floor for the foreseeable future. The bad news is that it turns out I have really shitty foresight. posted by M. Giant 7:38 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, May 02, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Hanna I finally did get around to seeing Hanna, as promised, and I enjoyed it, as expected. It's a weird little movie, one that could pass as almost completely non-Hollywood if not for the Hollywood cast. Aside from the actors, it just doesn't seem interested in much of what is considered necessary for an action movie. Which is why it works so well as an action movie. Trash and I like camping with M. Edium, but Eric Bana is raising Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) in some isolated arctic refuge so far off the grid the grid looks like a line from there. Obviously he's passing along all his bad-ass survival skills to the teenaged girl, but she's getting bored and she wants the movie to start already. So Eric Bana's like, okay, if that's what you want, and she's like, yep, pretty much, which sets in motion a whole chain of unlikely and yet somehow inexorable events. Apparently Eric Bana's had this whole plan in place for years, which we don't know anything about until we see it playing out. I'm not going to go into detail, but after you see it, you can have even more fun imagining how Eric Bana explained it to Hanna in advance. And imagining Hanna repeatedly saying, "Wait, I'm going to what?" in the dozen or so languages Eric Bana has apparently taught her over the campfire. So the plan is pretty much for them to split up and meet up again later elsewhere, with all sorts of adventures in between to show off their various quasi-superpowers. Which is all unlikely enough, but then Cate Blanchett shows up as an office executive from Hell, firing off Texas-flavored R's and L's through those choppers of hers that somehow seem a lot more predatory than usual. So we have our heroes and our antagonist, and a bunch of places to travel through, and a ruthless henchman who for some reason dresses like Owen Wilson in The Royal Tenenbaums, and we're good to go. Except we're not, because there's all kinds of other cool stuff going on throughout. This is a very stylish movie, with all of the action scenes shot in ways that are innovative enough to be interesting but not enough to be distracting, save one scene in which Hanna is chased through tunnels that are deliberately lit to look like a moving Escher-maze, and that's cool-looking enough that you don't mind being distracted. There's also the fascinating score by the Chemical Brothers, and I would just like to extend my congratulations to Mrs. Chemical for raising such talented boys. I'm the first person to ever make that joke, right? I almost have to be, I'm sure. One time in a fiction-writing class, I learned that when writing a story, keep it interesting by not going with the first thing you think of, but the second thing. Everyone who reads it has already thought of the first thing by the time you get to it, so if you go with the second thing, it keeps it interesting and unpredictable. I like how Hanna seems to go with that second thing wherever possible. Like, you know how a person on their own in foreign lands will inevitably encounter a stupid American tourist, or even a whole family of them? Hanna flips that script by making the stupid American family British instead. It's the little things like that, you know. There's some backstory, and something of a mystery, and some stuff about Hanna's origin story, but it's really not necessary. Hanna is at its best when it's stripped down to its essentials, when we're following the main character who is babe-in-woods, unstoppable fighting machine, and walking MacGuffin all in one. All the other crap the movie uses to explain her is just window dressing. Stuff from, if you will, an action movie that considered it necessary. Most of the time, this one knows better. posted by M. Giant 9:43 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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