Preparation

Prep is largely about deciding what NOT to do first.
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Another P Remark

"Damn it, my integrity keeps leaking out!" -- Dr. Pattie Thomas
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Happy Birthday to Me!

Today is my birthday! Pattie has been very nice to me today, taking me places and buying me things. Here I am with the birthday cake, which happens to be a cheesecake.


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Smarter than a Fifth Grader

This week's announcement that there is significant water on the moon, reminded me of a story about Carl's youth and water on the moon.

It seems that when Carl was in fifth grade, his class went on a field trip to a college to hear about science. Young Carl asserted that there could be water on the moon. He was first rebuked by the college professor and then rebuked by his teacher for bothering the college prof and then rebuked by his parents for being rebuked by his teacher.

Ah poetic justice...



So it looks like no adult involved was smarter than the fifth-grader!

Re: the _Onion_ satirical news periodical

"I'm having an Onion moment!" (To be used when a news story that has to be a parody turns out not to be. )

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Today's Guest Star: Dr. Pattie Thomas

P. came up with a quote I liked: "You're not a loser if you're in a no-win situation. "

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The Limit of My Creative Energies

There was an old, bad Europop song in the 1980's that had the line, "I sometimes feel like somebody's watching me. " Today, I sang instead, to the same melody line, "I sometimes feel like somebody's watching TV. " I would add an audio file for clarification, but I'll probably get sued for this as it is.

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The Path

Sometimes the path is to get off the path.
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Web 2.0

Web 2.0 = Yahoo 1999
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Again, I am one of those cool ppl who hangs around vans.


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Back @ Sonic

The van has survived, at least long enough to make it back to Sonic again. Here's P giving up on ordering by rolling down the window and speaking into the intercom.

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Here's me at the Green Valley Ranch sportsbook. T-shirt is one I got from the Minnesota Public Radio store in the Mall of America in Minnesota. It says, "So Many Books . . . So Little Time. "

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Van Go

A quick explanation / justification for last night's photos is in order. My van is in danger of being crushed. The extension of the Cash-For-Clunkers program has impelled us to do more research into trading up, and it looks like a better option than we thought at first. We're not sure when we're going to make the deal on a new vehicle, but it could be any day now. But you don't just say good-bye to a conversion van without initiating some sort of van-appropriate activity as a sendoff.

Pattie wanted to go to dinner at Sonic last night. It occurred to me that a Friday night at a drive-in restaurant would do nicely for van-informed festivities and related media. I took about a dozen photos with my BlackBerry, half of which I posted to this blog and half of which will never see the light of day again.

The van in question is a 1993 GMC Vandura. It has taken us all over the continent since we acquired it in 2000. But it is aging, and it is unsuitable for Las Vegas (low mileage, hard to park). We are probably going to sacrifice it if we can find a newer, smaller vehicle that isn't uniquely ugly and inefficient.

This van was not my first. But it was a thing of beauty at one time, a pinnacle of middle-middle class consumer culture. It had mood lighting, bucket seats, ambitious upholstery, and even a television. Pattie and I slept in it more than once when we were roughing it in some campground somewhere in North America. It will be missed.

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Time to leave. Wave bye-bye to the nice ppl on the Internet, Dr. Thomas. :)

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To satify any lingering curiosity on anyone's part, we present the interior of the custom van. (Mood lighting not pictured, because if it's on, it really ruins any attempt to take a photo. )

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P enjoying the Sonic Fries.

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I'm one of those cool people who hangs out around vans.

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SONIC VISIT
The van looks especially good tonight.

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P and I @ Sonic

I always enjoy a good drive-in restaurant. Here's P leaning out of the driver's side of the van to order.

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Predictions

Everybody's awfully damn clever about predicting the past.
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Surreal

The surreal ceases to be amusing when it becomes normative.
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Damn!

I just saw _Damn Yankees_ (1958) again and thought I’d make a few smartass remarks about it. I find any photographic evidence that there used to be an even less successful ball club in Washington than the Nationals to be worth pursuing, and the two hours I invested in this film were no disappointment.

My appetite was whetted by mention in the opening credits of choreographer Bob “Don’t Call Me ‘Ray’ “ Fosse and Jean “Stifle” Stapleton. (Predictably, the dancing was tremendous but the singing sort of meatheaded.) Tab “Cat/Fish” Hunter looked like Mike Nelson from “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” after whom Hunter was no doubt styling himself in this role. “Fred” Gwen Verdon reprised her role from the Broadway production, and I had no idea how in the hell someone who looked as ordinary as she did and couldn’t sing that well had gotten the Broadway part in the first place until she started dancing, which sort of settled it. Ray Walston manages to be funny and reprehensible at the same time playing “Applegate,” who is some sort of unpleasant character from Norse mythology, I believe. (Funniest line in film was one of Walston’s: “You’ll find out who’s got the pain in the mambo jambo!” Well, it was funny in context.)

I did check the imdb.com site after viewing the film, e.g. for any mention of a working title such as _The Natural Goes to Hell_. All I discovered of interest there was that the ballpark they used for the exteriors was Wrigley West, in LA (I thought those hedges looked out of place for Griffith Stadium) and that Bob Fosse was married to Gwen Verdon (it figures he’d marry a good dancer, and with her, you can tell it wasn’t for her looks).

All in all, a nice afternoon at the movies, and it turns out that the ism about baseball building character is true: there were plenty of role models for growing boys like me. In fact, I think I have selected my favorite already.

Carl “And the Hopes That Were Dashed the Day the Stock Market Crashed / Those Were the Good Old Days” Wilkerson

Rhyzynergy

Rhyzynergy is the possibility of necessity and the necessity of possibility.

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Xenophobia

The ultimate form of xenophobia is deciding that only one form of xenophobia exists.

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Derrida Inverted

If you reverse Jacques Derrida's famous quotation, it actually speaks more to the issue: "There is nothing INSIDE the text. "

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The Nothing Decade

The decade immediately after the 1990's. Name evolved from the difficulty of determining name in manner of "the '70's," "the '80's. " One couldn't really call it "the zeroes. " In near-retrospect (it will be 2010 in 8 1/2 months), I find my name fits well.

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Love :)

Love is the most worthwhile work there is.
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What's a blog without a cutesy cat picture? Here's one of our little girl. You can almost see the inner goodness shining out of her eyes.



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