It's waiting for you
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Re-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation
So, you say you don't have enough to occupy you on the internet? You say you're looking for somewhere to talk about Star Trek: The Next Generation? Well, Torie Atkinson and Eugene Myers have got the solution to both of your problems at The Viewscreen. They'll be re-watching the first season of TNG, one episode per week starting today a week from now with "Encounter at Farpoint", and they'd like you to join them! Re-live the glory days of the late 1980s, and the rebirth of the Star Trek franchise. Picard! Data! Wesley! Tasha!
It's waiting for younow soon . . .
It's waiting for you
Monday, November 14, 2011
Leave me right here
It's embedded music video time! Today's selection comes from 1997: "Volcano Girls" by Veruca Salt.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
A portrait of James Street
Somehow or other, I wound up owning a copy of Life in a Putty Knife Factory, a collection of humorous anecdotes published in 1943 by journalist H. Allen Smith. In addition to reminiscences of celebrities such as H. L. Mencken and Tallulah Bankhead, Smith also talks about some of his fellow journalists and writers.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that one of the writers he talks about is James Street, author of Good-bye, My Lady, the quintessential basenji novel. As a service to my fellow basenji enthusiasts, I now present, in full, Smith's account of Street. (Is Life in a Putty Knife Factory still under copyright? I eagerly await word from Smith's literary executors.)
* * *
(the following excerpt is from Chapter IX: Taking Pride in My Profession)
One of my best friends among authors is James Street, whose typewriter erupts novels, short stories, movies, magazine articles, and indignant letters. Mr. Street is forever working himself into an elevated dudgeon, usually over some fatheaded Yankee's gross misinterpretation of the War Between the States. He is from Mississippi, and most of his writing is about the South, and he spends long hours worrying over the Dred Scott decision, the Missouri Compromise, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. When he has achieved a proper degree of anger, he leaps to his typewriter and lets go with a long letter full of bitterness and invective. He seldom mails one of these letters. He writes them, signs them, thrusts them into envelopes, puts stamps on the envelopes, then lays them on a table and sits and glowers at them for an hour. Then he tears them up.
Like myself, Mr. Street attends the movies regularly. Whenever he happens into one involving the habits or history of the South, he comes away in a tremendous fury. I remember when he went to see Gone with the Wind. He came out of the theater cursing David O. Selznick and everyone else connected with the production. Mr. Street's violent dissatisfaction with the picture was based on one single detail: he said that in the burning of Atlanta the fools had the smoke blowing in the wrong direction.
He is a neighbor of mine and works in a room where he pursues one of his hobbies -- collecting potted plants. He has a couple of hundred plants, of all shapes, colors, and sizes, in that room, and on entering it a visitor sometimes finds difficulty in locating Mr. Street and his typewriter. Whenever I find myself in the place I unconsciously begin making Tarzan noises and start peering through the foliage for Dorothy Lamour.
I first met Mr. Street in the winter of 1933 at a Santa Claus convention. He had just come up from the South and was writing feature stories for the Associated Press, whereas I was doing the same for the United Press. One day a note came in the mail saying the department-store Santa Clauses of New York City would hold a convention at Grand Central Palace the following afternoon. This was the period of the NRA Blue Eagle codes and the Santa Clauses were assembling for the purpose of drawing up a program of ethics. A novel spectacle! By the very nature of his calling a department-store Santa Claus has to be a proficient liar -- a man as fundamentally dishonest as a real-estate agent. Moreover, I know it to be a fact that the average department-store Santa Claus hates and despises his customers -- the little ones -- and would enjoy nothing so much as running amuck in a crowd of tots.
At Grand Central Palace I wandered around in the various exhibition halls, finding no Santa Claus convention, and at last I sat down near the elevators to rest my feet. I was sitting there when an elevator door opened and a short young man stepped out. He glanced all around and then approached me.
"Begya pahdon, suh," he said, "but I'm lookin' for a bunch of dad-blamed Santy Clauses."
It was Mr. Street, and soon we were sitting down comparing notes and swapping newspaper experiences, and after a while we went wandering and found the convention. The Santa Clauses were in a little room far off in one corner of the building. There were about a dozen of them, and they had a keg of beer on a table. They were dressed in their Santa costumes, all but their whiskers which had been laid aside to facilitate the taking in of beer. If you have ever seen such an assemblage of Santas, minus their whiskers, you have seen something. And if you have ever heard them talk, you have heard something. They came in all shapes and sizes and there wasn't a jolly one in the group. Since that day I have never believed in Santa Claus.
So that was the beginning of a long and interesting friendship. Mr. Street and I sometimes go adventuring together, and while our roamings occasionally prove trying to organized society, sometimes even offending the body politic, we have fun.
There is one story I want to tell about Mr. Street but to get into it I've got to bring up the matter of the round chickens. One day in 1942 I chanced to meet a citizen of Peoria, Illinois, who was visiting in New York. He turned out to be a chicken fancier, and he said he had come East to acquire some round chickens.
"Round chickens," he said, "come originally from India. They got practically no necks and almost no legs. A hen will weigh as much as fifteen pounds and a caponized rooster will weigh as much as twenty. If they scrooched up a little and bounced, you could almost dribble them like a basketball. The poultry growers of the country are going to get wise to these round chickens. They got almost as much meat on them as a hog, and it's wonderful white meat. Once we get going with them, you won't go into a restaurant and order fried chicken or half a broiled chicken. You'll order a chicken steak."
It is the clear duty of a writing person, when he hears such a thing as this story of the round chickens, to get to work and find out all the facts, so I got to work. After a couple of hours at the Public Library I concluded that the Peorian had reference to the Cornish game chicken, or one of its kinsfolk.
Next I telephoned the Department of Agriculture's poultry division. They dug up their best chicken expert and I told him the story.
"Well," he said, "I think the man from Peoria is pulling your drumstick. If he says these hens grow to fifteen pounds, he must have hens with some ostrich blood in them. And the roosters -- if they got to weigh twenty pounds -- would be unmanageable. You'd have to build a steel-and-concrete fortress to hold roosters that big. They'd tear down an ordinary chicken house and they might even turn on their owners and murder them."
On my way home I stopped at Mr. Street's house, having remembered that in his early days he had been a chicken fancier. If these round chickens existed anywhere on earth, I figured Mr. Street would know about them. Having swallowed a good dose of quinine, I took my machete and hacked my way through the jungle of his study until I found him at his desk. We made our way back over the perilous trail until we reached the living room, where I laid the results of my research before him and did him the honor of asking his opinion.
He grinned at me and said he had never heard of round chickens and that, moreover, he was willing to make a confession.
"I was never actually very handy with chickens," he said. "It all dates back to an unhappy experience I had with chickens in Mississippi."
It appears that when Mr. Street was first married, down in Mississippi, he was a preacher -- the youngest clergyman in the country, known as "The Boy Preacher of the South." Under provocation he can still loose a sermon that'll curl the wallpaper. As a preacher he had a house and time on his hands so he decided to raise chickens. He built his own chicken house and made an elegant structure out of it. He bought a tribe of Rhode Island Reds and a flock of Plymouth Rocks, and then somebody told him that he should be careful never to let the breeds mix. He should never, they said, permit the Rhode Island Red roosters to raise dust around the Plymouth Rock hens, and the same went for the Plymouth Rock rooster and the Red hens.
So Mr. Street constructed his chicken house carefully with an eye to segregation. The building had two sections and there was a long chicken run with a fence between. This was certainly all correct, and he moved his flocks into their respective quarters.
He was extremely careful to keep Rocks separated from Reds at night. In the daytime he simply let all the chickens out into the yard together.
"Somehow," he said, "the notion was in the back of my mind that if I kept them apart at night, everything would be okay. I had this idea in my head that they only did that sort of thing at night. Before I knew it the whole thing was a mess. That's how much of a chicken expert I am."
I was pleasantly surprised to find that one of the writers he talks about is James Street, author of Good-bye, My Lady, the quintessential basenji novel. As a service to my fellow basenji enthusiasts, I now present, in full, Smith's account of Street. (Is Life in a Putty Knife Factory still under copyright? I eagerly await word from Smith's literary executors.)
* * *
(the following excerpt is from Chapter IX: Taking Pride in My Profession)
One of my best friends among authors is James Street, whose typewriter erupts novels, short stories, movies, magazine articles, and indignant letters. Mr. Street is forever working himself into an elevated dudgeon, usually over some fatheaded Yankee's gross misinterpretation of the War Between the States. He is from Mississippi, and most of his writing is about the South, and he spends long hours worrying over the Dred Scott decision, the Missouri Compromise, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. When he has achieved a proper degree of anger, he leaps to his typewriter and lets go with a long letter full of bitterness and invective. He seldom mails one of these letters. He writes them, signs them, thrusts them into envelopes, puts stamps on the envelopes, then lays them on a table and sits and glowers at them for an hour. Then he tears them up.
Like myself, Mr. Street attends the movies regularly. Whenever he happens into one involving the habits or history of the South, he comes away in a tremendous fury. I remember when he went to see Gone with the Wind. He came out of the theater cursing David O. Selznick and everyone else connected with the production. Mr. Street's violent dissatisfaction with the picture was based on one single detail: he said that in the burning of Atlanta the fools had the smoke blowing in the wrong direction.
He is a neighbor of mine and works in a room where he pursues one of his hobbies -- collecting potted plants. He has a couple of hundred plants, of all shapes, colors, and sizes, in that room, and on entering it a visitor sometimes finds difficulty in locating Mr. Street and his typewriter. Whenever I find myself in the place I unconsciously begin making Tarzan noises and start peering through the foliage for Dorothy Lamour.
I first met Mr. Street in the winter of 1933 at a Santa Claus convention. He had just come up from the South and was writing feature stories for the Associated Press, whereas I was doing the same for the United Press. One day a note came in the mail saying the department-store Santa Clauses of New York City would hold a convention at Grand Central Palace the following afternoon. This was the period of the NRA Blue Eagle codes and the Santa Clauses were assembling for the purpose of drawing up a program of ethics. A novel spectacle! By the very nature of his calling a department-store Santa Claus has to be a proficient liar -- a man as fundamentally dishonest as a real-estate agent. Moreover, I know it to be a fact that the average department-store Santa Claus hates and despises his customers -- the little ones -- and would enjoy nothing so much as running amuck in a crowd of tots.
At Grand Central Palace I wandered around in the various exhibition halls, finding no Santa Claus convention, and at last I sat down near the elevators to rest my feet. I was sitting there when an elevator door opened and a short young man stepped out. He glanced all around and then approached me.
"Begya pahdon, suh," he said, "but I'm lookin' for a bunch of dad-blamed Santy Clauses."
It was Mr. Street, and soon we were sitting down comparing notes and swapping newspaper experiences, and after a while we went wandering and found the convention. The Santa Clauses were in a little room far off in one corner of the building. There were about a dozen of them, and they had a keg of beer on a table. They were dressed in their Santa costumes, all but their whiskers which had been laid aside to facilitate the taking in of beer. If you have ever seen such an assemblage of Santas, minus their whiskers, you have seen something. And if you have ever heard them talk, you have heard something. They came in all shapes and sizes and there wasn't a jolly one in the group. Since that day I have never believed in Santa Claus.
So that was the beginning of a long and interesting friendship. Mr. Street and I sometimes go adventuring together, and while our roamings occasionally prove trying to organized society, sometimes even offending the body politic, we have fun.
There is one story I want to tell about Mr. Street but to get into it I've got to bring up the matter of the round chickens. One day in 1942 I chanced to meet a citizen of Peoria, Illinois, who was visiting in New York. He turned out to be a chicken fancier, and he said he had come East to acquire some round chickens.
"Round chickens," he said, "come originally from India. They got practically no necks and almost no legs. A hen will weigh as much as fifteen pounds and a caponized rooster will weigh as much as twenty. If they scrooched up a little and bounced, you could almost dribble them like a basketball. The poultry growers of the country are going to get wise to these round chickens. They got almost as much meat on them as a hog, and it's wonderful white meat. Once we get going with them, you won't go into a restaurant and order fried chicken or half a broiled chicken. You'll order a chicken steak."
It is the clear duty of a writing person, when he hears such a thing as this story of the round chickens, to get to work and find out all the facts, so I got to work. After a couple of hours at the Public Library I concluded that the Peorian had reference to the Cornish game chicken, or one of its kinsfolk.
Next I telephoned the Department of Agriculture's poultry division. They dug up their best chicken expert and I told him the story.
"Well," he said, "I think the man from Peoria is pulling your drumstick. If he says these hens grow to fifteen pounds, he must have hens with some ostrich blood in them. And the roosters -- if they got to weigh twenty pounds -- would be unmanageable. You'd have to build a steel-and-concrete fortress to hold roosters that big. They'd tear down an ordinary chicken house and they might even turn on their owners and murder them."
On my way home I stopped at Mr. Street's house, having remembered that in his early days he had been a chicken fancier. If these round chickens existed anywhere on earth, I figured Mr. Street would know about them. Having swallowed a good dose of quinine, I took my machete and hacked my way through the jungle of his study until I found him at his desk. We made our way back over the perilous trail until we reached the living room, where I laid the results of my research before him and did him the honor of asking his opinion.
He grinned at me and said he had never heard of round chickens and that, moreover, he was willing to make a confession.
"I was never actually very handy with chickens," he said. "It all dates back to an unhappy experience I had with chickens in Mississippi."
It appears that when Mr. Street was first married, down in Mississippi, he was a preacher -- the youngest clergyman in the country, known as "The Boy Preacher of the South." Under provocation he can still loose a sermon that'll curl the wallpaper. As a preacher he had a house and time on his hands so he decided to raise chickens. He built his own chicken house and made an elegant structure out of it. He bought a tribe of Rhode Island Reds and a flock of Plymouth Rocks, and then somebody told him that he should be careful never to let the breeds mix. He should never, they said, permit the Rhode Island Red roosters to raise dust around the Plymouth Rock hens, and the same went for the Plymouth Rock rooster and the Red hens.
So Mr. Street constructed his chicken house carefully with an eye to segregation. The building had two sections and there was a long chicken run with a fence between. This was certainly all correct, and he moved his flocks into their respective quarters.
He was extremely careful to keep Rocks separated from Reds at night. In the daytime he simply let all the chickens out into the yard together.
"Somehow," he said, "the notion was in the back of my mind that if I kept them apart at night, everything would be okay. I had this idea in my head that they only did that sort of thing at night. Before I knew it the whole thing was a mess. That's how much of a chicken expert I am."
Friday, November 11, 2011
Digital Day 111111
001101100101110101101011001010010100
011011010011010010101001010010101010
101000110100111010100011001010101010
And that concludes the digital days for this calendar cycle. Be sure to stop by for the next cycle of digital days, beginning on January 1, 2100.
011011010011010010101001010010101010
101000110100111010100011001010101010
And that concludes the digital days for this calendar cycle. Be sure to stop by for the next cycle of digital days, beginning on January 1, 2100.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Digital Day 111011
1001011001101101100010110001010
1000011011011000101100110111001
0011011110100100100101001001010
1000011011011000101100110111001
0011011110100100100101001001010
Monday, November 7, 2011
Dog walk: 11/7/11
By long custom, the basenjis know that the afternoon dog walk is long, slow, and leisurely: I amble along and enjoy the sun, while the dogs cast about looking for Unidentified Ground Objects. The afternoon dog walk typically takes one or two hours.
By equally long custom, the other two daily dog walks -- in the evening before I prepare for work, and in the morning after I return from work -- are different. There's not enough time for a long walk, so instead we all pile into the car and drive to the local no-leash dog park. There, the basenjis can sniff around unencumbered, and get to know any other dogs that happen to be around, before getting down to the serious business of doing their business. A trip to the dog park usually only lasts about ten minutes.
Back in Newport, the municipal dog park was a brief five-minute drive away. When I learned about the move to McKees Rocks, I went a-Googling, and found the nearest dog park fifteen minutes away at Riverview Park, across the mighty Ohio. There, atop Observatory Hill, the dog park sits beside the Allegheny Observatory.
Tonight, unusually, instead of making their standard inspection of the grounds of the small dog park, the dogs seemed intrigued by something out in the dark, beyond the park's chain-link fence. Louis in particular was fascinated, staring out into the darkness at I-knew-not-what. After about five minutes of this, Louis finally gave up his staring contest with whatever-it-was, and took care of business. I wondered what it was all about. Was there another dog hidden in the darkness? A skunk? Who could say?
We got back into the car, and started making our way down Old Barn Road, the much-patched single-lane road that leads up to the observatory. Looming in the headlights on our right, I saw three deer munching on the observatory's back lawn. After slowly passing them by (with the basenjis' attention rivited), another hundred yards down the road brought another set of three deer into the headlights. I stopped and waited for them to move away from the road (with the basenjis staring avidly), then continued on my way.
By equally long custom, the other two daily dog walks -- in the evening before I prepare for work, and in the morning after I return from work -- are different. There's not enough time for a long walk, so instead we all pile into the car and drive to the local no-leash dog park. There, the basenjis can sniff around unencumbered, and get to know any other dogs that happen to be around, before getting down to the serious business of doing their business. A trip to the dog park usually only lasts about ten minutes.
Back in Newport, the municipal dog park was a brief five-minute drive away. When I learned about the move to McKees Rocks, I went a-Googling, and found the nearest dog park fifteen minutes away at Riverview Park, across the mighty Ohio. There, atop Observatory Hill, the dog park sits beside the Allegheny Observatory.
Tonight, unusually, instead of making their standard inspection of the grounds of the small dog park, the dogs seemed intrigued by something out in the dark, beyond the park's chain-link fence. Louis in particular was fascinated, staring out into the darkness at I-knew-not-what. After about five minutes of this, Louis finally gave up his staring contest with whatever-it-was, and took care of business. I wondered what it was all about. Was there another dog hidden in the darkness? A skunk? Who could say?
We got back into the car, and started making our way down Old Barn Road, the much-patched single-lane road that leads up to the observatory. Looming in the headlights on our right, I saw three deer munching on the observatory's back lawn. After slowly passing them by (with the basenjis' attention rivited), another hundred yards down the road brought another set of three deer into the headlights. I stopped and waited for them to move away from the road (with the basenjis staring avidly), then continued on my way.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Life in the slow lane
Sorting through the boxes containing two recently-uprooted households takes a lot of time. Learning a new job also takes a lot of time. So, for the time being, I'm not going to have a lot of time to blog.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Dog walk: 10/13/11
A street map of McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania doesn't do the place justice. You have to look at a topographic map to see just how steeply the land rises from the Ohio River floodplain. The new house is perched on a hillside, facing west down the Ohio Valley.
It rained almost nonstop on the evening of the 12th, and as basenjis aren't noted for their enjoyment of getting wet, there was no chance to walk them then. At 5 AM on the morning of the 13th, the rain had stopped, and I decided that it was time for a walk.
We went south up a street rising at a 20 degree angle, the night sky overcast and the pavement still wet from the night's rain. There was an occasional car or truck passing by along Island Avenue at the bottom of the street, but no traffic up on the hillside.
Today was garbage day, and the dogs were inevitably attracted to the trash cans sitting in front of the houses. As we made our way up the street, they made frequent stops to sniff at plastic trash cans that all leaned slightly out of true, sharing the sidewalk's gradient. Most of the houses were decorated for Halloween with skeletons and jack o' lanterns.
The dogs were still uneasy about the unfamiliar streets, and within twenty minutes they were ready to return home. Ten minutes after we returned to the house, it began to rain again.
It rained almost nonstop on the evening of the 12th, and as basenjis aren't noted for their enjoyment of getting wet, there was no chance to walk them then. At 5 AM on the morning of the 13th, the rain had stopped, and I decided that it was time for a walk.
We went south up a street rising at a 20 degree angle, the night sky overcast and the pavement still wet from the night's rain. There was an occasional car or truck passing by along Island Avenue at the bottom of the street, but no traffic up on the hillside.
Today was garbage day, and the dogs were inevitably attracted to the trash cans sitting in front of the houses. As we made our way up the street, they made frequent stops to sniff at plastic trash cans that all leaned slightly out of true, sharing the sidewalk's gradient. Most of the houses were decorated for Halloween with skeletons and jack o' lanterns.
The dogs were still uneasy about the unfamiliar streets, and within twenty minutes they were ready to return home. Ten minutes after we returned to the house, it began to rain again.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Dog walk: 10/10/11
After we realized that we couldn't avoid forclosure, my wife arranged for us to move in with some friends of hers in a remote house in the Lehigh Valley. It was while she was there, making preparations for the move, that she (and they) were informed that the house was scheduled for demolition, and that both households would have to find new quarters.
A frantic search eventually resulted in the purchase of an astonishingly low-cost house in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh. And so it was that around 11:30 AM on the morning on October 10, we packed up the last of our belongings and left Newport for the last time, mere minutes before our street was closed off by the Columbus Day Parade.
Due to the odd circumstances surrounding the move, our first day's journey ended at the remote house in the Lehigh Valley late in the afternoon. By the time we had ordered a dinner of take-out pizza, night had fallen. I was ready for bed then, but the basenjis needed one last walk for the night, and so I took them.
It was overcast that night, and there were absolutely no street lights along the thousand-foot driveway leading from the house to the nearest road. Dark woods lined both sides of the driveway, and what sounded like a million birds filled them with noise. The basenjis were two dark shapes moving back and forth across the driveway, most of their motion filled in by my mind's eye from memories of a thousand such walks in the bright Newport sunshine. On each side were strange new scents to be sampled, and sample them they did. The only distinct features I could make out were the white fur of Louis' collar and legs; everything else was shadows against the deeper dark of the night.
We went slowly down the driveway to the road, and then just as slowly back up again. The dogs had all the opportunity they needed to relieve themselves for the night, though the darkness kept me from learning whether they had taken advantage of it. Then we were back in the house, and it was time for me to sleep, momentarily suspended between past and future.
A frantic search eventually resulted in the purchase of an astonishingly low-cost house in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh. And so it was that around 11:30 AM on the morning on October 10, we packed up the last of our belongings and left Newport for the last time, mere minutes before our street was closed off by the Columbus Day Parade.
Due to the odd circumstances surrounding the move, our first day's journey ended at the remote house in the Lehigh Valley late in the afternoon. By the time we had ordered a dinner of take-out pizza, night had fallen. I was ready for bed then, but the basenjis needed one last walk for the night, and so I took them.
It was overcast that night, and there were absolutely no street lights along the thousand-foot driveway leading from the house to the nearest road. Dark woods lined both sides of the driveway, and what sounded like a million birds filled them with noise. The basenjis were two dark shapes moving back and forth across the driveway, most of their motion filled in by my mind's eye from memories of a thousand such walks in the bright Newport sunshine. On each side were strange new scents to be sampled, and sample them they did. The only distinct features I could make out were the white fur of Louis' collar and legs; everything else was shadows against the deeper dark of the night.
We went slowly down the driveway to the road, and then just as slowly back up again. The dogs had all the opportunity they needed to relieve themselves for the night, though the darkness kept me from learning whether they had taken advantage of it. Then we were back in the house, and it was time for me to sleep, momentarily suspended between past and future.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Digital Day 101111
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100011010001011011010111010110010100101
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100011010001011011010111010110010100101
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Monday, October 10, 2011
Digital Day 101011
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0001101110100101011110100101101011
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0001101110100101011110100101101011
Sunday, October 9, 2011
A Convenience Store Chistmas
I spent Christmas Eve 1999 working the graveyard shift at a 7-Eleven. It was dead quiet, so I whiled away the hours composing the (until now untitled) poem below on a piece of scrap paper. That scrap paper hung from our refrigerator door for twelve years, until this afternoon, when my wife's cousin came and carted our refrigerator away in preparation for our departure from Newport tomorrow. I noticed the tattered, filthy piece of scrap paper sitting on the kitchen counter just now, and I decided that my work deserved, at long last, a wider audience than could be found in my kitchen. So I now present to my vast global blogging audience, just as I wrote it so long ago:
A Convenience Store Christmas
by Johnny Pez
Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the store
Not a customer bothered
To walk in the door
The newspapers lay
In their well-ordered stacks
And the drink fountains nestled
By beef-jerky snacks
While cigarettes stood
Upon multi-tiered shelves
In red and white boxes
Like cancerous elves.
When out of the frigid
Millenial night
My eyes were repulsed
By a hideous sight
A huge tractor-trailer
Had pulled up outside
MCLANE boldly stood out
Upon its vast side.
And out of the monster
Came two seedy men
In filthy gray jumpsuits.
They came in and then . . .
The bigger one walked up
And said with a sneer,
"Your order for ten tons
Of sunscreen is here!"
I spoke up in outrage,
"The devil you say!
We sent in that order
For sunscreen in May!"
"Take it or leave it,"
The evil man said
I wanted to take it
And bash in his head.
Instead I accepted
And signed his receipt.
He said "Merry Christmas"
And made his retreat.
Then as they departed
And drove off their truck
I called "Merry Christmas!
I hate you! You suck!"
A Convenience Store Christmas
by Johnny Pez
Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the store
Not a customer bothered
To walk in the door
The newspapers lay
In their well-ordered stacks
And the drink fountains nestled
By beef-jerky snacks
While cigarettes stood
Upon multi-tiered shelves
In red and white boxes
Like cancerous elves.
When out of the frigid
Millenial night
My eyes were repulsed
By a hideous sight
A huge tractor-trailer
Had pulled up outside
MCLANE boldly stood out
Upon its vast side.
And out of the monster
Came two seedy men
In filthy gray jumpsuits.
They came in and then . . .
The bigger one walked up
And said with a sneer,
"Your order for ten tons
Of sunscreen is here!"
I spoke up in outrage,
"The devil you say!
We sent in that order
For sunscreen in May!"
"Take it or leave it,"
The evil man said
I wanted to take it
And bash in his head.
Instead I accepted
And signed his receipt.
He said "Merry Christmas"
And made his retreat.
Then as they departed
And drove off their truck
I called "Merry Christmas!
I hate you! You suck!"
Dog walk: 10/8/11
Sunny skies, temps in the mid-70s. If you live in a northern climate like New England, global warming has its positive side. And as if to match the summerlike weather, Newport has summerlike crowds of tourists thanks to Oktoberfest at the Newport Yachting Center.
Today's first "Are those basenjis?" encounter took place in front of Newport City Hall, when a tourist stopped me to tell me about the pet basenji he had in his youth, and to remark on how good-looking my own were, which is certainly true enough. The second took place on Lower Thames Street, in front of Ben & Jerry's, when a couple stopped me so they could point out to their daughter what the basenji half of their basenji mix looked like.
The basenjis and I were crossing Aquidneck Park when I got a call from my wife telling me that she had just made reservations at Sardella's restaurant in half an hour. As I've noted before, I received a Sardella's gift card for Christmas, and since we're leaving town for good in two days, this would be our last chance to use it. It was a near-run thing, but the dogs and I managed to make it back home in time for me to dress for dinner, and we turned up at the restaurant at the exact time we had reserved. I had the pasta marinara with a side of garlic bread, and it was delicious.
Today's first "Are those basenjis?" encounter took place in front of Newport City Hall, when a tourist stopped me to tell me about the pet basenji he had in his youth, and to remark on how good-looking my own were, which is certainly true enough. The second took place on Lower Thames Street, in front of Ben & Jerry's, when a couple stopped me so they could point out to their daughter what the basenji half of their basenji mix looked like.
The basenjis and I were crossing Aquidneck Park when I got a call from my wife telling me that she had just made reservations at Sardella's restaurant in half an hour. As I've noted before, I received a Sardella's gift card for Christmas, and since we're leaving town for good in two days, this would be our last chance to use it. It was a near-run thing, but the dogs and I managed to make it back home in time for me to dress for dinner, and we turned up at the restaurant at the exact time we had reserved. I had the pasta marinara with a side of garlic bread, and it was delicious.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
A going-away present
I had a particularly unpleasant experience last night with some Skeptical Drunks. There were four of them, and they wanted to go outside for a smoke, but none of them was able to come up with a light. Since we're a smoke-free establishment, we don't keep matches or cigarette lighters around, and when they came up to the front desk for a light, I had to tell them that I had none.
Being Skeptical Drunks, they continued to stagger into the lobby and ask me again for a light, and I continued to tell them no, and they continued to go back out. A couple of them got tired of taking no for an answer; one of them began swearing at me, while the other began rifling through the desk of the hotel's concierge. Both refused to stop, so I ordered them out of the hotel. Instead of leaving, the one who was swearing began to add threats and homophobic slurs, and I decided to call the police and have them throw the two out. While I was on the phone, the one at the desk came over and spit at me. Hotel security arrived then, and after spending a couple more minutes spewing abuse at me, the drunks left for their room.
The police arrived and escorted three of them out of the hotel, telling them that if they returned, they'd be arrested; the fourth was apparently passed out in the room and couldn't be roused. An hour later, the three returned to the hotel, and the one from the room, apparently no longer unconscious, let them in through the fire door. I called the police again, but they did not arrest them. Instead, the two abusive ones were driven to a donut shop and dropped off there, while the other two were allowed to stay in their rooms. It turned out that the drunks were all off-duty cops from out of town, and the local cops wouldn't arrest them.
Eventually, the two abusive cops came back from the donut shop with two of their friends, and the four of them marched back up to their room. I called the local cops again, and was told that they had no grounds for arresting the drunks, and advised me to let them sleep it off before telling them to leave later on. One of the hotel managers showed up then in the normal course of events, heard the whole story, and also advised me to let the abusive drunk cops sleep it off. I gave in and did so.
I'm suddenly a lot less sorry to leave Newport than I was.
Being Skeptical Drunks, they continued to stagger into the lobby and ask me again for a light, and I continued to tell them no, and they continued to go back out. A couple of them got tired of taking no for an answer; one of them began swearing at me, while the other began rifling through the desk of the hotel's concierge. Both refused to stop, so I ordered them out of the hotel. Instead of leaving, the one who was swearing began to add threats and homophobic slurs, and I decided to call the police and have them throw the two out. While I was on the phone, the one at the desk came over and spit at me. Hotel security arrived then, and after spending a couple more minutes spewing abuse at me, the drunks left for their room.
The police arrived and escorted three of them out of the hotel, telling them that if they returned, they'd be arrested; the fourth was apparently passed out in the room and couldn't be roused. An hour later, the three returned to the hotel, and the one from the room, apparently no longer unconscious, let them in through the fire door. I called the police again, but they did not arrest them. Instead, the two abusive ones were driven to a donut shop and dropped off there, while the other two were allowed to stay in their rooms. It turned out that the drunks were all off-duty cops from out of town, and the local cops wouldn't arrest them.
Eventually, the two abusive cops came back from the donut shop with two of their friends, and the four of them marched back up to their room. I called the local cops again, and was told that they had no grounds for arresting the drunks, and advised me to let them sleep it off before telling them to leave later on. One of the hotel managers showed up then in the normal course of events, heard the whole story, and also advised me to let the abusive drunk cops sleep it off. I gave in and did so.
I'm suddenly a lot less sorry to leave Newport than I was.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Dog walk: 10/7/11
Sunny, with temps in the low 60s. Still good dog walking weather.
The basenjis and I were walking up Thames Street, across from the Brick Alley Pub, when I heard the words, "Are those basenjis?" A women was smiling at the dogs, and I assured her that they were, indeed, basenjis. She told me that she had had a tricolor basenji as a pet years before; unfortunately, he bit the paperboy and had to be put down. She adored Klea and Louis, though, as well she might.
We stopped in at the Black Dog store on Bannister's Wharf, where the basenjis are often given treats by the staff. They're having their "Black Dog lookalike contest", and though the basenjis are red dogs, I entered them anyway, since every contestant receives a free bag of dog treats, and it's against the Guild Rules for basenji owners to turn down free dog treats.
In Perrotti Park, a long line of cruise ship passengers was waiting to embark on MSC Poesia. Twice, a passenger stopped me with the words "Are those basenjis?"and of course I had to let the dogs enjoy some well-earned praise. Such is the hard life of a basenji owner.
The basenjis and I were walking up Thames Street, across from the Brick Alley Pub, when I heard the words, "Are those basenjis?" A women was smiling at the dogs, and I assured her that they were, indeed, basenjis. She told me that she had had a tricolor basenji as a pet years before; unfortunately, he bit the paperboy and had to be put down. She adored Klea and Louis, though, as well she might.
We stopped in at the Black Dog store on Bannister's Wharf, where the basenjis are often given treats by the staff. They're having their "Black Dog lookalike contest", and though the basenjis are red dogs, I entered them anyway, since every contestant receives a free bag of dog treats, and it's against the Guild Rules for basenji owners to turn down free dog treats.
In Perrotti Park, a long line of cruise ship passengers was waiting to embark on MSC Poesia. Twice, a passenger stopped me with the words "Are those basenjis?"and of course I had to let the dogs enjoy some well-earned praise. Such is the hard life of a basenji owner.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Dog walk: 10/4/11
Partly sunny, temps in the 60s. Still good dog walking weather.
We were coming down Tilden Avenue when we ran across a woman who was also walking her dogs, a pair of Jack Russell terriers. She was just entering Governors Graveyard with her dogs, who were off leash, and the basenjis and I followed her. We had crossed paths with her before, but never had a chance to stop and talk. It turned out that her dogs were recent acquisitions, one from the Potter League for Animals, the other from a shelter in Arkansas. Her previous dog, another Jack Russell, had been attacked and killed by a pair of German shepherds while she was walking him. She was still horrified by the memory, as you might imagine.
I mentioned to her that I would be leaving Newport in six days due to foreclosure, and she said that her home was facing foreclosure too. She had been trying to get a mortgage modification for five years, and had never managed it. After losing her job, she had been forced to stop making mortgage payments, and was only a couple months away from losing her house.
I wished her luck, and she wished me luck, and the basenjis and I went on our way.
We were coming down Tilden Avenue when we ran across a woman who was also walking her dogs, a pair of Jack Russell terriers. She was just entering Governors Graveyard with her dogs, who were off leash, and the basenjis and I followed her. We had crossed paths with her before, but never had a chance to stop and talk. It turned out that her dogs were recent acquisitions, one from the Potter League for Animals, the other from a shelter in Arkansas. Her previous dog, another Jack Russell, had been attacked and killed by a pair of German shepherds while she was walking him. She was still horrified by the memory, as you might imagine.
I mentioned to her that I would be leaving Newport in six days due to foreclosure, and she said that her home was facing foreclosure too. She had been trying to get a mortgage modification for five years, and had never managed it. After losing her job, she had been forced to stop making mortgage payments, and was only a couple months away from losing her house.
I wished her luck, and she wished me luck, and the basenjis and I went on our way.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Two founding Time Lords are better than one
WARNING: Blog post contains hardcore Doctor Who geekery! Read at your own peril!
I was reading Charlie Jane Anders' review of the Doctor Who season six finale at io9, and was intrigued by her mention of something call the Cartmel Masterplan, which I had never heard of. Basically, late-1980s script editor Andrew Cartmel wanted to retcon the Doctor's backstory in order to restore some of the mystery that had been a feature of the series' early years. To this end, he decided to make two of the founders of Time Lord society, Omega and Rassilon, into contemporaries.
Omega was first introduced in "The Three Doctors", a 1973 serial which celebrated the series' 10th anniversary by bringing back Third Doctor Jon Pertwee's two precedessors, Richard Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. As revealed in the story, Omega was a legendary figure among the Time Lords -- so legendary, in fact, that he was widely regarded as a myth until the Doctors learned that he A) was real; and B) had been trapped in an antimatter universe for untold ages. Omega died at the end of "The Three Doctors".
Rassilon was first mentioned in "The Deadly Assassin", a 1976 serial where Fourth Doctor Tom Baker returns to Gallifrey to prevent an assasination. Rassilon himself was revered as the ancient founder of Time Lord society, and two relics associated with him, the Sash and the Rod of Rassilon, play a part in the story's finale.
Note the different ways the Time Lords viewed them. Omega was a mythical figure whom nobody believed had been a real person. Basically, he was the Time Lord King Arthur. Rassilon, OTOH, was a thoroughly historical person. In the 1980 serial "State of Decay", the Doctor is able to read a document written by Rassilon himself, and in the 1983 20th anniversary special "The Five Doctors" much of the action takes place in Rassilon's tomb. In other words, Rassilon was the Time Lord Alfred the Great.
So, you had a mythical Time Lord founder from a time of legends, and a historical Time Lord founder from ancient history. And that was a good thing. It gave Time Lord society a sense of depth. And then Andrew Cartmel had to go and spoil it by trying to make the two men contemporaries for no good reason. Fortunately, the original series ended before Cartmel could make his stupid idea canon, and the new series has killed off all the Time Lords except the Doctor himself, so the question is moot.
But the idea is out there. There's always the chance that executive producer Steven Moffat, or one of his successors, will run out of ideas for the show, and decide, in desperation, to bring this one back from the grave. I live in fear of that day.
I was reading Charlie Jane Anders' review of the Doctor Who season six finale at io9, and was intrigued by her mention of something call the Cartmel Masterplan, which I had never heard of. Basically, late-1980s script editor Andrew Cartmel wanted to retcon the Doctor's backstory in order to restore some of the mystery that had been a feature of the series' early years. To this end, he decided to make two of the founders of Time Lord society, Omega and Rassilon, into contemporaries.
Omega was first introduced in "The Three Doctors", a 1973 serial which celebrated the series' 10th anniversary by bringing back Third Doctor Jon Pertwee's two precedessors, Richard Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. As revealed in the story, Omega was a legendary figure among the Time Lords -- so legendary, in fact, that he was widely regarded as a myth until the Doctors learned that he A) was real; and B) had been trapped in an antimatter universe for untold ages. Omega died at the end of "The Three Doctors".
Rassilon was first mentioned in "The Deadly Assassin", a 1976 serial where Fourth Doctor Tom Baker returns to Gallifrey to prevent an assasination. Rassilon himself was revered as the ancient founder of Time Lord society, and two relics associated with him, the Sash and the Rod of Rassilon, play a part in the story's finale.
Note the different ways the Time Lords viewed them. Omega was a mythical figure whom nobody believed had been a real person. Basically, he was the Time Lord King Arthur. Rassilon, OTOH, was a thoroughly historical person. In the 1980 serial "State of Decay", the Doctor is able to read a document written by Rassilon himself, and in the 1983 20th anniversary special "The Five Doctors" much of the action takes place in Rassilon's tomb. In other words, Rassilon was the Time Lord Alfred the Great.
So, you had a mythical Time Lord founder from a time of legends, and a historical Time Lord founder from ancient history. And that was a good thing. It gave Time Lord society a sense of depth. And then Andrew Cartmel had to go and spoil it by trying to make the two men contemporaries for no good reason. Fortunately, the original series ended before Cartmel could make his stupid idea canon, and the new series has killed off all the Time Lords except the Doctor himself, so the question is moot.
But the idea is out there. There's always the chance that executive producer Steven Moffat, or one of his successors, will run out of ideas for the show, and decide, in desperation, to bring this one back from the grave. I live in fear of that day.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Digital Day 100111
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