Summer 2010 brings an exciting schedule of free films in and around Washington, DC. Bring a blanket or lawn chair and enjoy films under the stars.

Because it’s what came to mind when I composed the song.  Listen and download here.

Filed under: music, Uncategorized Tagged: MOD, music, timesuck, yay!

I love it when these CNN breaking news alerts come through…and make no sense. These are clearly EMS alerts; but why is CNN sending them as breaking news alerts? Confusion. The first one:

MEDICAL-TRANSFER LCEMS () Loc:LAIRDS TO MERIDIAN Rcvd: 13:24:46 10006073

And the second:

(4) U:LC405, E:10006068, ET:MEDICAL-TRANSFER, ST:€, P:0, LOC:LAIRDS TO RILEY’S, MAP:, T:11:32:46, A:LCEMS, D:LCEMS, N:, PH:, S:, C:

5/1/2010 11:32:50 LC403 : DSPTCH & primary unit.

5/1/2010 11:32:51 LC403 : ENROUTE

5/1/2010 11:37:05 LC403 : ATSCNE

5/1/2010 11:48:49 LC403 : ENROUTE TO HOSPITAL

5/1/2010 12:31:45 LC403 : AT HOSPITAL

5/1/2010 12:44:26 LC403 : AT STATION

5/1/2010 13:35:15 LC403 : AVAIL

Filed under: EPIC, Local, National, News, Technology, Uncategorized

Download and listen here.

Filed under: music, Technology, Uncategorized

Books. No cable, not a lot of movies, but there were always lots of books and periodicals in my house. And Xenu bless ‘em, my parents worked their way through them, from cover to cover. It rubbed off on me. I took great pride in my ability to slog through any kind of printed material. If I started something, I was going to get through it, no matter how many times I drifted off to sleep.

This was easy enough to do while I was still in elementary school, and was reading mostly novels or popular history. In junior high school, I got it into my head that I should try to become a well rounded person, and would take the occasional stab at biology, mathematics, physics or philosophy. My patience and understanding quickly hit a wall, and with the exception of philosophy, I gave up trying to understand anything scientific or math related.

Still, that work ethic remained, and I’d doggedly try and get through Plato and Montesquieu, Dante and Pound, Joyce and Pynchon, succeeding more often than failing, but when I couldn’t bear to continue on with the print equivalent of Ambien, blaming myself for my lack of discipline and stick-to-it-ness.

My first indication that there was a better way to read occurred while I was reading a magazine interview with the French cartoonist Moebius. I don’t remember anything about the interview, except the fact that he mentioned one of his comic books was inspired by a book of poetry that he never finished reading. I was scandalized at the time, and thought less of him both as a human being and an artist.

So I continued mindlessly plodding through the world’s great literature through my years as an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba. Sometimes it paid off, as in the case of Foucault’s Pendulum, but more often than not, well, it pretty much went in one ear and out the other.

Perversely enough, a film studies course made me realize that reading books all the way through from cover to cover wasn’t always the best use of my time. During a class discussion, someone made a comment to the effect that they never walked out of movies. For a brief moment, we all sat around nodding and murmuring our assent, smug in our belief that we were all good, tolerant, and open-minded people.

Then our professor spoke up. “I do,” he said, “All the time. When you get to be my age, you realize life is too short to sit through something you don’t enjoy.” I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. At first I used this newfound bit of wisdom only in extreme circumstance, and only when watching movies.

But gradually that attitude began to seep over into reading. It started slowly at first: I finished the first part of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, and then quickly gave up on ever finishing the rest of it a couple of pages into the second part. Soon I was gleefully skimming and skipping my way through works of non-fiction, and happily giving up on novels after reading a hundred pages past the start or when I was only fifty pages away from the end.

My attitude toward finishing books became even more extreme, more insouciant. I used to devour novels by Christopher Buckley and Will Self, but after paging through their latest efforts I realized it was more bother than it was worth. In fact, my go to hell attitude has become so extreme, I realized the other day that I had finally come full circle: maybe I’d been too quick to delete Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. I enjoyed reading the first hundred pages or so, but as it was a little long, maybe it was a little bit like the television series Oz: something best enjoyed in small doses over an extended period of time.

Besides, if I get bored I don’t have to finish reading Quicksilver. I can stop reading it whenever I want…

Writing is…okay, but it’s DEFINITELY not even ⅛ as fun as making a film with a friend!

A vibrating Santa. Stuffed, plush, and cute in that really bland, obnoxious way that Hello Kitty is. And it vibrates. Worse yet, it laughs. When Dad showed it to me years ago, I winced. Maybe I was in my early twenties, still in university, and had a lot of vulgar, half-assed Marxism rattling around my noggin. Or it could have been my late twenties. By then the half-assed Marxism would have been pounded out of my skull by cold, hard reality. However, my fear of remaining forever on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder brought a pained expression to my face.

But not this year. When my sister brought it out, that tacky ball of plush fabric stuffed with cotton made me smile. My Dad sold a million of them. It was one of many good calls that he made during his career as a buyer for Saan Stores, a discount clothing retailer in Western Canada. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Teletubbies, Big Mouth Billy Bass, and countless other fads. The executives above him would hem and haw, but the old man had a gut instinct that was never wrong.

Even when he got kicked to the curb, forced out into early retirement, Dad had the last laugh. Almost to the month after his severance package ran out, the company went bankrupt. Anyone that had stayed on with the company, including the Doubting Thomases that second guessed my father’s judgment for a good chunk of his career, got nothing.

When Matthew Weiner was still running around getting half-caf no foam soy cappuchinos for David Chase, my Dad was the original Don Draper. Dad earned a fraction of what Draper earned (adjusted for inflation), didn’t smoke, was a moderate drinker, and was faithful to his wife, but inasmuch as I love watching Mad Men, I consider it an accurate reflection and vindication of my father’s core values as a businessman: hard work, honesty, integrity, dedication, and loyalty.

December 2009 will be a festive month in the nation’s capital. Many of the best holiday sights are free.

Computers were, initially, a crushing disappointment. When our sixth grade teacher announced that I was one of the special few that had been chosen for the computer class, I was excited. The machines certainly looked better than what I’d seen on Star Trek. A monitor and keyboard encased in beige plastic certainly looked more futuristic than the big boxes with blinking lights that dotted the pop culture landscape.

But using those Apple II computers turned out to be nothing like what I’d seen on The Jetsons. The first couple of times that I made the little green triangle move across the screen were fun, but pushing it across the screen got progressively less and less interesting the more our little class of brainiacs did it.

And when our teacher tried to get the little robot to move in tandem with the “Turtle” on the screen, the results were…underwhelming. Our teacher spent most of the class racing back and forth between his computer and the twitching, humming, slow moving robot on the floor. Real-life computers and robots weren’t half as glamorous, or smart, as the ones I’d see on Astroboy after school.

When I found out that my friend (who had been deemed less intelligent) had spent an agreeable morning drawing and painting in an extended art class, I asked if I could drop out. However, quitting was not an option, according to my teacher. I was intelligent, resources were limited, and I should be more grateful for the opportunities presented to me.

Suitably chastened, I resumed spending most of computer class watching the teacher try to make the robot work its magic on the floor. Since then, I’ve taught my share of classes and I realize that Steve Jobs wasn’t the person responsible for the dull class. The blame for that can be placed entirely on the shoulders of our teacher, who probably hadn’t done adequate lesson planning.

All was not lost. The public sector of The People’s Republic of Saskatoba might have dropped the ball when it came to preparing me for a fun-filled future full of flying cars, holo decks, and replicants, but the private sector, in the form of my Dad, helped revive my flagging interest a few months later when he purchased, or started buying, the components of a Commodore 64.

Our family was one of limited means, so the purchase was made piecemeal. The keyboard was the first piece that we had. I hooked it up to the black and white television, and to my delight, discovered that I could make pictures with the keyboard. I started building little forts, tanks, cannons, and aircraft, and set about demolishing them using the delete and cursor keys.

It was certainly a lot more fun than watching the turtle move ever so slowly across the screen. And once we got the disk drive…oh, the wonderful mayhem I could unleash on the screen. Mom might have flipped out when she saw the X-Men cover where Storm was getting ready to stab some hapless evil mutant with a dagger, but I could strike down as many foes as I wanted to with a digital katana and I wouldn’t hear so much as a single objection from my mom.

Was really I learning anything about computers, though? I suppose, at the very least, that Commodore 64 taught me that computers wouldn’t bite. At best, Dad grasped on an intuitive level (and I learned from his example) that a desktop or a laptop represents better all-around value for money than a gaming platform.

As for that friend of mine whose intelligence was deemed insufficient enough to handle the challenges of computer class?

He is currently teaching high school chemistry.

Me: Cool! Hal Sparks is a non-drinker just like me.

Sweetie: That’s right. Penn Jillette, Hal Sparks and you could have a party. A party with no drinking or smoking. A very boring party with just the three of you.