If I made movies...

...I would make exactly the same movies as the (sort of) famous Kevin Booth. With a name like that and talent, he must be soooo cool.

The Iron Artichoke

I worked for a subsidiary of the gas and electric utility in San Francisco that for some reason had to move away from the mother ship and so decided on a move to Portland OR. In due time a beautiful building was designed and built on the Willamette River. To commemorate this move and a recent pipeline project, a sculpture was commissioned at apparently great expense. As soon as the conceptual renderings for the piece were passed around this thing was dubbed the ‘Iron Artichoke’. After the Iron Artichoke was completed but before it could be sited in front of he new building in downtown Portland, the local planning commission found out that this would be the ‘art’ adorning the building and quickly decided it didn’t meet zoning requirements…or so the story goes. The Iron Artichoke was relegated to the hinterlands and ended up in front of the Spokane office building where it really did look like crap; eventually kind of fell apart, and finally disappeared.

One day we sort of got lost in the basement of the Portland building and walked into a room with hundreds of Iron Artichoke facsimiles (they look far better than the original) in rotting boxes that had never been handed out to those worthy enough. We all grabbed one and I’ve still got mine…why…I don’t know.

HiFi

Since I am apparently an expert, how about another foray into ultra-nerdom…the world of the hifi geek. I enjoy a respectable hifi setup as much as the next guy, but…it is possible to go too far. If the photos weren’t available you wouldn’t believe it. Most of this stuff looks like lab equipment (basically is) and has an equivalent price tag.

This was the device used to animate the monster in ‘Young Frankenstein’…and it plays CDs too!

Hello!...now that is a horn…looks like an eardrum destructifier to me. No really, an over the top but beautiful piece of audio technology and I’ll bet it sounds great.

What planet are we on now? Check out the speaker cables-you could run about 230kV through those.

Many audiophiles have specially designed ‘listening rooms’…cool…if only I’d gone to med school.

I'm a (Nerd) God

So much for the uber-cool downtown slickster persona. I was joking about the geek thing on this post...oy vey!...this is what you get for studying science in college-the ulitimate in nerdnisity. My daughter is a TA in the chemistry department at the local college and this will have to be kept secret so as not to discourage her nerd quest.

45% on the dumb and dorky scale-ouch!

The Dude

I love the scene from ‘The Big Lebowski’ where ‘the Dude’ is shopping at the local grocer, in his bathrobe, while he pinches a carton of milk, and then sidles up to the checker with milk all over his lips--perfect! He sums up…he is dudeness. Something way down inside me really admires this guy--his lack of guile, simplicity, and complete disregard for the façade we all show to one another.

At this point in time, it’s not a matter of what I’m going to be when I grow up, that’s already been settled, but who or what I will be. I guess I need to believe that is still up for grabs. So, ‘the Dude’ pretty much does it for me, gives me goose bumps every time I see that scene from the movie. I’m thinking a cross between or perhaps inhabiting the space between ‘the Dude’ and someone like Henry Gieger would be good.

The good ole' days?

1956: In the fields near my hometown of Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley of California, a farm worker is forced to stand naked while being sprayed with DDT. The photographer was later arrested for 'documenting' such treatment.

Another monkey story

I look at this and ask myself…what were you thinking of? My normally discriminating taste in objets d’art was apparently absent the day I spied it. Well, the artist was a cool guy who was really putting it out there, something that should be encouraged, right? So, I wanted to support him in his quest and thought I should get something and the monkey pic was the least expensive painting he had on display. At the time I thought it was great...oy vey!

I suppose I’ll put it next to the family portraits at the lake place.

Private Dancer

From the recent copy of "The Word". File under 'why didn't I think of that?' Perhaps it would give me something to do on Friday nights.

4 8 15 16 23 42...

...are the magic numbers.

I never watch TV, except when I do. Usually, I prefer to relax in the evenings with literature and classical music (on the radio at 88.7, KAGU, it just keeps on rolling). Now that may seem pretentious, but I’ve found that if you try hard enough, you actually become pretentious, and then it’s OK, sort of.

Enough of that…it turns out that watching a hit TV show on DVD is a splendid way to keep up. You can watch a whole season in a matter of days. I find the pacing of a weekly TV show interesting as it’s so different from a movie, and something you don’t really notice until you watch the TV show like a movie, a really long, digressive movie. An unfair comparison perhaps: a movie has about 2 hours to wrap everything up, a TV series keeps on rolling until the ad $$ dry up.

Lost is kind of like a cross between Mysterious Island, The Magus, and Survivor (with guns). With one cliffhanger after another, all you have to do is click to the next episode to see the (partial) resolution. I’m totally hooked, but after 25-30 episodes of season 1 and now most of season 2, I’m getting a little bit itchy as to what it’s all about. I mean, how can long can they string this thing out? The downside of watching via DVD is that the next set of DVDs is a year away, so you forget a lot about the show.