Saturday, April 30, 2011

Entry 62: God Save the Queen



Try as I might, I was unable to completely ignore the royal wedding. I am living in a Commonwealth country after all. Also, the Thursday NY Times crossword puzzle was devoted entirely to the royal wedding, which caused a lot of grumblings in the puzzle blogosphere. I was one of the grumblers. First, nobody should care about the royal family, the same way nobody should care about Paris Hilton. Why do you care about people who don’t do anything other than be rich and famous? Second, certainly no Americans should care about the royal wedding, and the New York Times shouldn’t be devoting a Thursday puzzle (usually one of the best days) to such an obscenely lavish and boring affair. It wasn’t even a creative puzzle. All the answers were completely straightforward.

There are many cool things in British culture, the comedy, the Premier League soccer, heck, we all owe the Brits a huge debt of gratitude just for their rock-n-roll alone. But this whole royalty stuff is a huge load of malarkey, and I consider it my duty as an American to mock it at all turns.

In this spirit, I give you the Junkyard Dog vs. “The King” Harley Race in Wrestlemania III, 1987. Fast forward to minute 5:00 to see how a real America treats a “king”. (The gimmick: it was stipulated before the match that the loser would have to bow before the winner after the match.)



Actually, the whole clip is gold. Tons of ridiculously fake action, and it’s beautifully commentated by Gorilla Monsoon and Jesse “The Body” Ventura. Before he was a borderline nutjob conspiracy theorist, he was governor of Minnesota, and before that he was a heel wrestler/commentator. Bob Uecker is also in the mix, but you don’t hear him for much of the clip, because he left the booth, supposedly to pursue the Fabulous Moolah who was the presenter of the crown for this match. The joke being that Moolah is a very burly and unattractive woman.

Ever since my déjà vu moment involving wrestling discussed in my last entry, I’ve been going through and watching old matches. Wrestlemania III was definitely the best Wrestlemania from my childhood. My dad actually bought it for me on pay-per-view, and we watched it live. It was in the Silverdome in Detroit, and at the time it set a record for largest crowd at an indoor “sporting” event with over 93,000 people. Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant was the headlining match. At the time, Andre had a back injury that was so debilitating that he couldn’t walk from the locker room to the ring. He had to use this mini-wrestling-ring shuttle thing. The organizers made all the wrestlers use them so that Andre wouldn’t look out of place.

Andre the Giant was a pretty interesting dude. He really was a giant. He was over 7 feet tall, and weighed around 500 pounds. He was a natural entertainer due to his size alone. He was a pro wrestler for many years, and he starred in several movies, most notably the hilarious classic, “The Princess Bride”. (I wasn't able to embed any clips for some reason, so click here for a scene with Andre the Giant, and click here for another great scene without Andre).

Unfortunately, his gigantism led to all sorts of health problems (he had several back surgeries), and he died at the relatively young age of 46. I’m sure it didn’t help his health that he was probably an alcoholic. His boozing was legendary. Somebody I know once worked for a sports venue and used to see the wrestlers backstage whenever the WWF (now the WWE) came to town. He said that Andre would always have a box of wine with him. Along these same lines, this article claims that he would intake 7,000 calories a day in alcohol alone. That’s absurd. I saw a piece on Andre on TV once, and they allude to his drinking by using terms like “jovial” and “festive”. Well, at least he was a jolly drunk. Can you imagine the havoc this man could have wreaked if he were a mean drunk?



Anyway...

I’m a bit tired today, because I woke up earlier than I normally do on the weekend. A dog was barking insanely for a solid ten minutes at about 8:00 this morning just outside my apartment and that got me up. I peeked outside my window and some woman had tied her dog to a pole while she went to get coffee from the café next door to me. Thanks lady.

This dog was going absolutely ballistic. It literally did not shut up for at least ten minutes. I noted the time. Dogs are weird. Some of them are so tame and mellow (the good ones), and others are like a soda that’s been vigorously shaken. Once the top is popped, chaos. I don’t mind dogs (although it does bother me when owners seem to be oblivious to the fact that their dog is annoying everybody else around them), but I don’t love dogs either. I wouldn’t mind if, as a society, we dialed back our dog adulation a few notches. Just a few.

S doesn’t seem to be that into dogs either, so I doubt we will ever get one. Maybe, if we have kids that really want one, but even then, I don’t know. They would have to be old enough to take care of it themselves, which means we're talking junior high at the earliest. My sister got a Doberman Pinscher when she was a teenager and it was basically her dog, it slept in her room, she fed it, walked it, etc. (although, if I asked my dad about this, he might have a different story). Maybe I could do that as a parent, I’d have to see.

Anyway, this dog was pretty cool, much like Andre the Giant he was enormous, and much like Andre the Giant he could consume massive amounts of calories, of dog food and table scraps, of course, not alcohol. (We used to give him old hotdogs and old lunch meat every now and then, and he would eat the meat in literally a split second, *gulp*, and it was gone.) Sadly, like Andre the Giant he had serious back problems and died at a very young age.

Well, on that note, some jokes. Nothing segues better to comedy than a story about a dead dog.

I decide to go with three jokes this week instead of five. The theme is bad pun.

1. The elevator man in my building is really diabolic. Every time I ask to go down to the main floor, he smiles and says, “Yes, I’ll be sending you straight to ‘L’!”

2. I eat a lot of seafood. I’m not sure why. Just for the hal-i-but.

3. I used to eat a lot of eggs, but those days are ova.

You know why they call them eggs? Because unfertilized chicken embryo sounds fucking disgusting.

Eggs must have some good PR reps, because many people eat eggs who are disgusted by other parts of the chicken. The eyes, the neck, the heart, the feet, “Yuck! I’m not touching those parts!” The oozing orbs of discharged reproductive matter, “Get the stove going.”

You’ve been a great audience. Thank you and good night.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Entry 61: It Was a Good Friday



Where does Good Friday rank on the list of Fridays? Certainly it’s below Friday the Ice Cube movie, but it’s definitely better than Next Friday the terrible sequel. I’d probably put it somewhere between Joe Friday the detective from Dragnet and TGI Friday’s the mediocre chain restaurant (and my employer the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college).

[Although not the "real" Joe Friday, Dan Akroyd is the one I remember.]

Tomorrow is Easter. I’m not Christian, so there isn’t a whole lot for me to celebrate, but I do appreciate the long “break”. (Down Under you get four days off for Easter. Well, three days off for Easter and one for Anzac Day.) I put quotes around the word break, because I’ll be spending much of it writing a paper for work, so it’s time off from the office, but not really a break.

S has been away in Myanmar on a work assignment for a while, and she really wanted me to visit her, but it’s too much traveling for such a short visit. I would lose two full days in transit, and I probably would get very little done on this paper, and I need to make some serious headway on it. Plus, she’s coming home soon, anyway. I actually didn’t even know that I had this much time off until just a few days ago. That works against me with S, because she’s asked me many times to get my holiday schedule, and I still haven’t done it. All in all, though, I’d say S is disappointed, but understanding that I’m not coming to visit.

I slept in until 11:30 yesterday which is the latest I’ve slept in a long time. I was slightly irritated to have missed the morning, but my body needed it. I got almost no sleep last Sunday, and I couldn’t catch up the entire week. The reason I got almost no sleep on Sunday is because somebody in the boutique directly below my apartment forgot to turn off the stereo when they closed down shop. It was bumping all damn night. I tried turning on the fan to drown out the noise, and I tried using earplugs, but nothing worked. In fact, earplugs made it slightly worse because it blocked out all the noise except for the bass, so instead of music I just heard dull thuds, “boom, boom, boom.” Bass is like kryptonite to earplugs.

Anyway, the next day I called the shop, politely explained to the worker what had happened, and asked if, in the future, they could be sure the stereo is off when they leave. She was super apologetic and said of course. That was that. It sucked, but it was an honest mistake.

On a completely different note, I had a weird déjà vu experience a few nights ago. I was doing some sort of menial task, sorting laundry, I think, and I had a podcast called The Film Vault on in the background. They were discussing some movie whose name I didn’t catch. I wasn’t paying that close of attention to it until they played the movie’s theme song, and this avalanche of nostalgia came down on me.

From roughly ages 8-11, I was a big wrestling fan (the fake kind), and the song they were playing on the podcast was the entrance music for an old wrestling tag team called The Midnight Express. When I heard this song, it immediately took me back to that time period in my life. The feeling I got is hard to describe other than to say it was nostalgic and extremely intense.

[The Midnight Express.]

The movie they were talking about is also called The Midnight Express (which explains why the tag team used the theme song as their entrance music). It’s apparently mostly set in a Turkish prison and is supposed to be incredibly disturbing. I haven’t seen it, but now I’m curious about it and might watch it someday. Incidentally, it’s indirectly referenced in the comedy classic Airplane! (“Timmy, have you ever been in a Turkish Prison?”) Anyway, I linked to the theme song below. I like it. It’s got an eerie to feel it.



In political news, there appears to be renewed focus on the Sarah Palin’s-child-isn’t-really-her-child-but-her-grandchild story. By which I mean somebody on Facebook put up a link to an article about it. I read the article. There are some interesting points in it, don’t overall I’m not really buying it. Maybe I’m naïve, but I tend not to believe these conspiracy theories. Most of the time the “evidence” is really thin, and often the theorist uses flawed logic – it’s purported that A happened, I’ve looked into it and I can’t explain how A could have happened, therefore A probably didn’t happen. Ultimately, I don’t really care about this particular conspiracy. My opinion of Sarah Palin is already so low, that her perpetrating a massive lie to the American public barely moves the needle. It is interesting though how this story is way fishier than the Obama’s-true-birthplace story, which has been as debunked as it possibly can be, and yet the latter is much more well-known and prevalent in the media.

In comedy news, I watched a bunch of Mitch Hedberg clips on youtube the other night. Mitch was a comedian who gained a sort of cult following ten years ago or so. He died in 2005, essentially of a drug overdose. Drug use was at the heart of a lot of his jokes. I had heard about him from several people, but had never seen his act, so on a whim I decided to look him up on youtube. He was pretty funny. I recommend watching some of his clips.

[Mitch Hedberg.]

Two of my favorite jokes of his:

I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.

When I think of a joke I have to get a pen and write it down. If the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that the joke wasn’t that funny.

Inspired by Mitch Hedberg, I’m going to start ending each blog entry with five jokes, mostly ones that I come up with. Now, by no means am I going for Mitch Hedberg type laughs. I’m going more for the comic strip Luann type laughs. That is, you never really laugh at all, but you read it anyway because it doesn’t hurt anything, and you have nothing better to do.

(By the way, I’m putting the over/under at three entries containing jokes. That’s about how many I expect to get to before I get bored with this idea.)

First, some math-nerd jokes. The last two aren’t mine. People I know came up with them.

1. Remember those old bumper stickers “Mean People Suck”? I never understood those, what’s wrong with being average?

2. I wasn’t born in a hospital. I was born in a house. I’ve been thinking about buying the house when I get older, so that I can die in the exact spot I was born. People will say I didn’t do any work in my life.

3. Every dance is the robot, given a sufficiently advanced robot.

Now a joke about not being able to sleep that I came up with while lying awake Sunday night.

4. Sometimes when I’m lying in bed at night, and I can’t sleep, my mind will wander to dark and disturbing places. The other night I had a rape fantasy. I fantasized that somebody was raping my goddamn neighbor whose music was keeping me up.

I know, I know, rape jokes aren’t cool. It’s a bit weird how rape is such a socially taboo topic, but it’s completely acceptable to talk about murder, a far more heinous crime. Case in point, there’s no literary genre called “rape mystery”. When I was a little kid, I used to love playing Clue – a board game based entirely around murder. Can you imagine how horrified people would be if there was a rape equivalent? “It was Professor Plum, in the frat house, with the roofie.”

And in honor of Good Friday, one about religion.

5. The problem with religion is that you can't pick and choose what you want to believe. It’s a package deal. And it’s not even a good package deal. All the rules were decided long ago, and it doesn’t seem like the deciders were very good at their jobs. If I had been in charge, things would have been much better.

“Hey Boss, we’re got a draft of the tenets of that religion we were thinking of starting.”

“Okay, great, let’s hear them.”

“Well, first off, we want to spread a message of love, we say, ‘Love thy neighbor.’”

“Yeah, I like that.”

“Also, we’re not a violent people, we want peace on Earth.”

“Yes, that’s good, as well.”

“And we want to help the sick, the poor, and the old. Care for those who cannot care for themselves.”

“Great, great. This all good stuff.”

“Then we were thinking that we could worship a crucified carpenter who came about from a virgin birth. You know, we could praise him and pray to him, and our best athlete’s could reference him during post-game interviews. Maybe every so often we could even have ceremonies where we drink wine and pretend that it’s his blood.”

“…”

“Boss?”

“Let’s just go with those first three.”

Religion is a lot like cable television. Many Sunday afternoons have been wasted on them, and for a few good channels, you sure have to buy a whole lot of garbage.

You’ve been a great audience. Thank you and good night.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Entry 60: Does Obama Read My Blog?

[Reader of this blog?]

I know, it seems unlikely that President Obama is among the four people (myself included) who read this blog, but in my last entry I wrote the following, concerning the “serious” and “courageous” Republican plan (spearheaded by that Ryan guy) to balance the federal budget.

If I were a Democratic politician I would repeat the following again and again and again, “They don’t really want to balance the budget, they just want to finance tax cuts for the super rich.”

This week Obama offered a plan of his own. He also gave a well-deserved verbal smackdown of the Ryan Plan. Here’s a quote.

There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.

It appears as if Obama is taking my advice. What other explanation is there than that he reads this blog?

The Dems have a pair of aces in that Reps want to extend tax cuts for the super rich, and they want to potentially devalue Medicare by turning it into a voucher system. I don’t think either of these is popular with the voting public. Obama needs to keep playing this hand.

In other news, I mentioned a job prospect a few entries ago, and I interviewed with a second person about it a few days ago. The interview went OK, I wouldn’t say great. At the end of it, he asked me to do some math problems. I couldn’t do the first one, because it was dealing with some things that I haven’t looked at in a very long time. They aren’t deep concepts, but in order to solve problems on them, I’d need at least a few minutes to go through and review definitions and that type of thing. He seemed to be OK with this – it’s perfectly reasonable to me to not have something fresh in your mind – but who knows? Maybe in his head it was a strike against me.

The second problem he asked me was this. You have a coin, and you have three directions you can go, left, right, and straight. You must use the coin to determine which direction to take. The underlying assumption here is that you want a process that returns all the directions with equal probability.

Now, I should say, that I am not very good at solving things like this on the spot. It’s not how I work. I like go to slowly, I like to belabor the obvious if need be, I like to reconsider everything I do, even easy things. Thinking analytically on my feet is extremely difficult for me. To make matters worse, I’m self-conscious about it. I’ve always felt like I’m an inefficient thinker, and so when people want to know my thought process, and when pressure is on me to produce instantly, sometimes I get up in my head, and don't do as well as I could.

For the first few moments after he posed the question, I wasn’t even thinking about it. All I was thinking about was how I wasn’t thinking about it. It’s akin to that feeling when you can’t sleep, so you start obsessing about how you can’t sleep, which of course only makes it worse.

Anyway, I sat there for what seemed like a very long time (I’m not sure how long it was in actuality), and had quite a few “OK, here’s… no, wait… that won’t work” moments, before I came up with a solution that works and that he seemed to be happy with.

(Spoiler alert: I'm going to reveal the answer now.)

Flip the coin twice. This gives you four possible outcomes (HH, HT, TH, TT). Before you flip, assign the three directions to the first three outcomes. If any of these come up then that's the direction you go. If you get the last outcome, then you just do the entire thing again. It’s mathematically impossible for the last outcome to happen every time, so eventually this process will give you a direction to go.

It seems pretty simple in retrospect. I would have liked to come up with this immediately, and I would have liked to have answered the interviewer’s first question, but what can you do? I didn’t knock it out of the park, but I didn’t completely whiff either. We shall see…

Speaking of baseball, it’s the baseball season. (S-weet!) I’ve been trying a new thing, betting on baseball. Sports betting (really gambling of any sort) is legal and prevalent Down Under. I tried betting on football last fall, but I lost more than I won. I started with $100 and probably lost $40 total on football. The NFL is just too unpredictable. But with baseball, I’m up about $45. Being that I only had about $60 to start with, that’s a pretty good return so far. However, it’s not clear to me whether this is something that’s sustainable or if I’ve just been getting lucky. Either way, I keep the stakes low, and if I lose my initial $100 I’m out, so it’s not like I’ll be pawning my wedding ring for funds, or getting my legs busted by Paulie Walnuts or anything like that.


[I took Brett Cecil to beat the Red Sox today at 1:1.5 odds. He did.]

[Gratuitous picture of Brett Cecil's fiancee.]

The thing is, it wouldn’t be completely out of the question if I could keep winning. Since I was a second grader, I’ve been a baseball stat-nut. I used to play out full leagues on Nintendo and meticulously keep stats on every game that I played. I used to collect baseball cards and spend more time reading the backs than looking at the pictures. More recently, I’ve gotten into “advanced stats” and, for the most part, I keep up with the game. I know what I’m doing. But do I know what I’m doing enough to beat those shifty odds-makers? I’m not convinced yet.

Anyway, I’m going to end this post now. It’s been pouring rain here all damn day, but it looks like it might have let up a bit. Maybe I can sneak in a trip to the gym without getting drenched.

Nope, it started pouring again as I punched that last period. Boo.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Entry 59: Politics and The Fridge

Whew! I almost wasn’t able to post this entry tonight. I was just about to shutdown, but then I had some last minute negotiations with myself (no, that’s not a euphemism for anything), reached a deal, and was able keep this blog going.

This whole U.S. budget quagmire is turning into a bit of a farce, isn’t it? The Republicans just want to reduce spending so that they can cut taxes for the already filthy rich, and the Democrats just want…, well, I’m not sure what they want exactly. I think they want to oppose the Reps, but they do such a bad job of it that I have trouble believing that that really is their goal. They do put up a fight over some things, mainly social things, which is good and all, but when it comes to the big economic issue of producing a sustainable federal budget, they seem content to let the Reps control the conversation.

The thing I find funniest (in a dark comedy way) about this is that I think the Dems have a winning hand in the economy with the American people. If I were a Democratic politician I would repeat the following again and again and again, “They don’t really want to balance the budget, they just want to finance tax cuts for the super rich.” I think this could resonate with voters in the same way Obama’s “Your taxes will not be affected if you make less than $250,000 a year” did during the 2008 election. For one thing, that the Reps aren’t serious about balancing the budget is absolutely true as Paul Krugman (my new man crush) has been detailing in his recent excoriations of the Ryan plan. For another, it’s completely unintuitive to talk about reducing the deficit and cutting taxes simultaneously. This would be like the head of a household trying to balance the family budget by taking a pay cut. Now, the Reps would counter with supply-side-esque economic theories (that don’t actually work in practice) and Heritage Foundation studies, but these are complicated arguments from partisan sources. The intuition is against tax cuts here. I would exploit this as a hypothetical Democratic politician.

And then, just to prove a point, I would support 95% of the proposed Republican spending cuts, but refuse to support any tax cuts. Then I would turn to my opposition and say, “C’mon, bitches, if it’s about balancing the budget, then let’s balance the budget.” When they inevitably denied me, I’d say, “See. That's what I thought.”

OK, enough about politics. (Out of my four readers, three have probably already quit reading.) Instead I’ll talk about a few Yahoo! stories I clicked on recently (I’m a total sucker for their headlines when I go to check my fantasy baseball team, “What? ‘Gaga danced until feet bled.’ I have got to check this out.”) The first is a short article about a “shocking” youtube video showing a “teen ‘fight club’” in the Sydney suburbs. The only thing I found shocking about it is that people find this shocking. This is what knuckleheaded 15-year-old boys do (I know, using knuckleheaded and 15-year-old boys in the same sentence is redundant). In the video, the kids don’t seem to be doing much more than boxing, wrestling, skateboarding, and being general jackasses (pushing the couch on the skateboard ramp is quintessential pointless jackass-ery and made me laugh). I used to do shit like this all the time. (Although, I didn’t drink at that age and I never skated.) At least they have a “referee” and are wearing gloves when they box.



When I was that age, I used to get together with the neighborhood kids and play “football” on this piece of crap field that was more weeds and rocks than grass and dirt, and it was basically just a giant royal rumble. The only real reason for the football was so that we’d know who to try to jack up. Every now and then somebody would break or tear something serious (I remember a kid breaking his collar bone once), but usually the injuries were things like a bloody lip or a jammed finger, so you’d go home for the night and then come back the next day. In retrospect, it does seem pretty brutal, and it seems amazing that most boys even survive their adolescence, but at the time somehow it isn’t, and they do.

The second article is about a 10-year old boy Cliff who gave former Chicago Bear football player William “The Refrigerator” Perry his Super Bowl ring back. Apparently, Perry had to sell it when he hit tough times financially. It’s just a feel-good fluff piece, so it’s probably pointless to criticize it, but there was one part of it I found funny. Cliff’s mom Tracy is talking about how Cliff obtained the ring in the first place.

"When Cliff saw the ring, he said he had to have it," Tracy said. "Once I saw the price, I said, 'Absolutely not. We're not buying the ring.'

"He ended up taking money out of his savings account. We told him it was money for college, but he ended up getting the ring."

Right, he just took the “money out of his saving account” and just “ended up getting the ring.” Because, you know, 10-year olds can just walk into a bank and withdraw money that’s set aside for college. They don’t need adult permission or anything like that. Hey, if your prepubescent kid wanted to drain their college account on video games and candy, you would be absolutely helpless as a parent – nothing you can do. Still, I guess it's a nice gesture to give The Fridge his ring back.


In other news, my work in going pretty well. I’m mostly through the bottleneck that was really slowing me down. I should be able to make good progress for a while. I will have to start working closely on some things with somebody who’s difficult to work with, but whatever. He’s a nice guy, but he’s impossible to communicate with. His English is really bad (I mentioned him in a previous entry), and he just says “yes” to everything.

“So x is taken care of?”

“Yes”

“And y as well?”

“Yes”

And then, of course, I find out – when nothing is working for me and I’m utterly annoyed –neither x nor y was done, at all.

In other, other news I went to the store today and was disappointed that they only had salted cashews. I love eating cashews, but the salted ones are too salty, so I usually also buy a bag of the unsalted ones, which are too plain, and then mix them to get the perfect salt to nut ratio. But they didn’t have the unsalted ones, which is annoying. Actually, it’s annoying that I even have to mix them in the first place, and that the manufacturer doesn’t offer a lightly salted variety. Why are the only two options Dead Sea and Negev Desert? How about something in between?

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Entry 58: The Doobie Brothers and Brian Wilson



I saw the Doobie Brothers and Santana at the Hope Estate Winery last weekend. It was pretty fun. Santana was headlining and the crowd was more into Santana, but I might have to give the nod to the Doobie Brothers as to who was better. Santana was cool, but he gets a little too “jammy” for my taste sometimes. Also, he would go off on these new age, spiritual spoken-word riffs from time to time (“look in the mirror tomorrow, feel your positive energy for peace and togetherness”). I’m sure they would’ve been really awesome if I was high on mescaline or something like that, but I wasn’t. I only had a mild wine buzz going.

The Doobies are a band I got into ironically, but then came to appreciate genuinely. There are several bands/artists like that for me, Toto, The Offspring, Lady Gaga (although that new “Born This Way” song is pretty awful), and Neil Diamond, to name a few. The story of the Doobies is that my friend J and I were watching an episode of “The Simpsons”, on which Reverend Lovejoy narrates a flashback scene of when he first came to Springfield as the young hip optimistic reverend looking to make a difference, and in the background “Jesus is Just Alright with Me” is playing. After that, J made me a Doobie Brothers mixed CD kind of as a joke (it’s titled “All the Doobies Anybody Needs”), but they have some genuinely good songs – Old Black Water, China Grove, etc. I mean they aren’t exactly the Beatles, but they can rock it.





Since they were the opening band, the crowd wasn’t really that into it when they started, so I probably looked way too excited when they fired into the aforementioned “Jesus is Just Alright with Me” as their second song. I and some middle-aged woman were the only people dancing in the venue at that point, I think. You see this woman at every concert of a band that’s at least 30 years old, by the way. She’s in her mid/late-40s, wearing something that is just a little bit too revealing, she’s a little drunk and dancing maniacally from the get go. I like this woman – she’s thinking, “Fuck it. I’ve got three kids and a balding husband at home. I’m having a good time while I have chance, even if I’m the only one.”

My favorite part of the show was the Doobie Brothers’ encore. Before they even came back out, I was yelling “China Grove! China Grove!” which made my companions laugh because they had no idea what I was talking about (they didn’t know much Doobies), and because we were approximately a quarter mile from the stage. But, the Doobies came back onstage, faked like they were gonna do a slow song, and then bam! China Grove.



My least favorite part of the show was when a woman asked me to move or sit down because she couldn’t see. She had a baby in her lap. Who brings a baby to a rock concert? That doesn’t sound like fun for you, the baby, or the person who you just told to move.

In other news, an article on a crossword puzzle appeared recently in the sports section of the New York Times. It talks about how San Francisco Giants closer Brian Wilson always wanted to be an answer in the puzzle, but he wasn’t famous enough, until some constructors came up with the idea to make a puzzle with a same-name-baseball-pitcher-musician theme (Brian Wilson also being the name of the main songwriter of The Beach Boys). I did the puzzle. It was a really good, but here’s the thing. I had that idea two years ago!

Not only did I have the idea, but I made a very similar puzzle and sold it to a very shorted lived crossword puzzle computer app thing. I even used Brian Wilson as one of my answers (and Kenny Rogers which also appears in the NYT puzzle). The NYT puzzle is better than mine. It’s more intricate and has a very clever “revealer” answer (“perfect pitch” which can apply to baseball or music), but I wasn’t trying to make my puzzle NYT quality. My puzzle was part of a 15-puzzle package*, so I had to crank it out quickly. If I had spent a little more time on it, and submitted it to NYT, who knows? Anyway, it was a weird feeling for me to see this puzzle being praised in the NYT when I did a similar one two years ago that nobody knows about it. It’s not bitterness (the NYT constructors made a great puzzle, that I enjoyed), but it’s a sort of missed-opportunity regret. Anyway, below are the players I used in my puzzle.







Anyway, it’s quickly becoming winter here, which is like spring/summer for all you PNWers. I’m still generally wearing short sleeves, but it’s too cold to swim in the ocean. I went for a run today along the beach and was damn near blown away. It was w-in-dy. Some guy had a massive kite connected to a harness he was wearing, and he would jump and let the wind carry him 10 yards or so at a time. It looked like fun.

My work has been going slowly. I think we (meaning me and my supervisors) bit off a little more than we can chew with our last idea. It’s a piece of an algorithm that’s pretty simple in theory, but the intricacies of actually coding it are completely bogging me down. I feel badly because each time I meet with them I have to tell them that I’m not finished yet, but I’m the only one doing the actual nuts and bolts work, and it’s not easy. At least, it’s not easy to do quickly and correctly. Anyway, my next meeting is in a week, so hopefully I will have some results to show them by then.

Well, that’s all for now.

*Somewhat amusing story. The woman in charge of this crossword puzzle app thing was asking for 15 puzzles, all of the same theme, from which she would possibly buy 10. I had a hunch that this opportunity wouldn’t be around long (it wasn’t), so I asked a friend who was into crossword puzzles and sort of dabbling in constructing, if he wanted to make some sports puzzles. He said, OK, so I made 9 puzzles and he made 6. The editor, who specifically said that she didn’t look at who made what puzzle, picked all 9 of mine and one of his. Ha-ha. I felt kind of guilty about it, but what can you do?