Author: kelson

Organizing Comics

I finally got around to reorganizing my way-too-many boxes of comics. Mainly I had a bunch of stuff on the top layer I hadn’t looked at in months and a bunch of stuff in the middle layer I kept dragging out, but I also found a bunch of comics I don’t want to keep anymore…

…including my entire Transformers collection.

I’m giving my friends first crack at those, and the rest of it (including the stuff left over from the last few clean-out rounds) is up on my website.

If you’re interested in any of the following (or anything at the above link), let me know:

List of Transformers comics up for grabs

Mistargeted

One of the *ahem* “perks” of registering to vote as “decline to state” is that you get political propaganda from all sides. But this is far beyond anything I’ve seen before.

Someone from the NRCC Business Advisory Council called me, at work, to invite me to the “annual dinner with President Bush.” (Not surprisingly, the NRCC is the National Republican Congressional Committee.)

Someone really missed the boat on that research.

(Meanwhile, having looked at their website, I’m trying to figure out how an agenda can be both progressive and conservative.)

Admittedly, the Democratic party doesn’t line up perfectly with my ideals either, but they seem bigger on things like civil liberties, good citizenship (at home and internationally), consumer rights, and—in a bizarre twist—financial responsibility than the Republicans are these days, and the Libertarian party is too far on the “business can do no wrong” side to be taken seriously. Even small-l libertarianism doesn’t work for me: while I like the idea of small government, I also like the idea of government-as-watchdog, making sure businesses don’t totally screw us over. (Even then, they can go too far, like the eternal cries of “Comic books/movies/TV/video games are corrupting our youth!” that never stop, just jump to a new medium every decade or so.)

I suspect I will eventually find a party I agree with, but there will only be three other members, none of whom want to run for office.

Static

Random thought of the afternoon: I always get nervous when I walk around the server room and I can feel the static electricity in my hair.

The room’s supposed to have anti-static tiles, but I’ve still managed to shock myself occasionally.

Ramp of Doom Update

I keep forgetting to post about it, but last week there was another car accident on the Ramp of Doom. This time, as I drove up and around the cloverleaf, there was an SUV stopped several feet down the slope inside the curve, at such an angle that I just couldn’t figure out what enabled it to stay put, with a police accident investigation unit crawling around the area.

What’s interesting is that all the accidents I’ve seen (with the possible exception of the multi-car pile-up, in which case I don’t remember what type of vehicles were involved) have involved SUVs. Maybe it’s just statistical likelihood given what’s popular to drive, or maybe it’s the high center of gravity like sekl suggested.

I can see clearly now

The sun is shining for the first time in over a week, and the gardeners at our apartment complex are out in force, almost as if they were on call, waiting for a chance for it to be dry enough to work.

It’s always amazing how green the hills are after rains like this, and it always seems unbelievable that they’ll be golden brown again by summer.

Current Music: Guess.

Weekend Thoughts

Rain should not fall at an angle more horizontal than vertical.

Whoever came up with the idea for a warning chime to let you know your headlights are still on is a genius, and has saved my car battery many times over.

It doesn’t take much rain to screw up freeway visibility. I could swear I’ve driven in heavier rain and been able to see better.

Our apartment complex suffers from the same problem as UCI: no one bothered to build in decent drainage. Fortunately that’s only been a problem with the sidewalks so far, and not, say, parking or storage.

What the heck is “white whole wheat” flour? It sounds like raw Twinkies, or wild tofu, or Sweet ’n’ Bland. Is it a 50/50 blend or something?

If you run a Persian restaurant, and advertise belly dancers, no one really cares whether the dances are authentic. On that note, Caspian is very loud, at least on Saturday nights. But the food’s good.

The web is a stranger place than you think. Yesterday I was looking at website referrer stats, and discovered a link to our Comic Con photos on a site that specializes in super-heroine, uh, “fantasies.” I.e. dressing models up as superheroines and then, shall we say, reversing the process. Apparently with rope often involved, though that’s almost classic if you’ve seen any 1940s-era Wonder Woman. They had a page full of links to people’s convention photos, focusing on cosplayers.

Just how do they fit Christmas lights into the box? I’d rather let the cord tangle up and then untangle it next year than go through the exercise in frustration that involves trying to get them all into the plastic framework, only to have them pop out, not fit in the box, etc. At least when you untangle them to put them up, you get something out of it: pretty lights on the tree (or window, or roofline, etc.) All you get from carefully placing each light in the frame is a box you’re going to put away and ignore for 11 months, and you can get that much more easily just by jamming the string of lights into the box in the first place.

Off-Ramp of Doom

I’ve been driving the same route to work for about two years, finishing with a transfer from one freeway to another and then to the first exit. The transition ramp is a cloverleaf up onto a bridge. Aside from an incident in which I was nearly clipped by a maniac in a Mercedes who insisted on climbing into my trunk on the off-ramp and zoomed past me the moment it reached the second freeway, I’ve never encountered anything worse than merging traffic.

In the past month I’ve seen three accidents—or, more precisely, one accident and two aftermaths.

First was an SUV that I watched slowly make a U-turn and crash into the center divider. (I have no idea how much control the driver had over the car at the time, but I swear I saw the wheel fall off when it hit.) Then last week there was the aftermath of a multi-car pileup on the side of the road. With the rain yesterday, I deliberately avoided the ramp and took the previous exit and surface streets. I was driving on automatic pilot today, so I took the ramp, and there was a car on the right shoulder and another SUV parked backwards, its right front wheel crunched into the center divider—in almost exactly the same spot as the one I saw a month ago.

Edit: I just wasted 10 minutes to bring you this *ahem* high-tech diagram:

The Ramp of Doom

*@#$

I just realized one of my friends is touring Thailand this month, and I’m not sure whether he’s back yet or, if not, what part of the country he would have been in on Sunday.

Somehow he’s managed to be in New York during 9/11, Madrid during the train bombing, and now (maybe) Thailand during the tsunami.

Current Mood: 🙁worried

Actor’s Nightmare

I haven’t done any acting in years, but I still occasionally get the Actor’s Nightmare. (When I saw the Buffy episode where Willow dreams she’s in the play that doesn’t quite make sense, I sat up and said, “I’ve had that dream!”)

Last night I dreamed I was in a community theater or children’s theater production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It seemed to be only the songs from the movie, not the entire play. It was opening night, and there was a certain lack of sufficient rehearsal.

The canonical actor’s nightmare is like the clasic final exam nightmare—the final exam in the class you never actually attended, for instance. The play makes no sense, you don’t know your lines, you’re not even sure how the scenes go together, but everyone else knows what they’re doing. (I never did figure out what the tanks were doing in Oklahoma in one of my dreams.) This was different: I hadn’t just missed rehearsals, there hadn’t been enough rehearsal. There were scenes we hadn’t even blocked, never mind actually practiced.

So it’s opening night, it’s a makeshift theater (basically a conference room with a pair of doors near one end, one going to the descignated green room and the other outside), and the audience is arriving. We’re all “backstage” (i.e. in the next room), I’m running through songs (OK, we havent rehearsed this part, but I know most of the song anyway…), and for some inexplicable reason I’ve been cast as Gaston (it didn’t make sense in the dream, either), and I’m running through the song, when I realize… who’s playing LeFou? I start asking the other actors, and nobody knows. I ask the stage manager, and he doesn’t know.

Did I mention I have the vague sense throughout that this is the theater troupe from Something Positive?

So the audience is here, the lights (room lights, we don’t have any actual stage lighting) are up, and people are out there starting to sing, and we don’t even have the entire show cast yet, never mind rehearsed! I’m trying to figure out just how much I can muddle through the opening scene without someone to play off of, and I’m not even certain we have anyone playing Belle out on stage…

…and then I woke up with “Going Through the Motions” running through my head.

Current Mood: 🙁restless
Current Music: Going Through the Motions