the Hydrant

08:06 pm - Meme's the word.

Reply by typing the word "worms".

I will then give you five words that remind me of you.

Then post them in your blog and explain what they mean to you.


These having been bestowed by silverlily81 (and ignoring the fact that it's technically nine words:

Harry Potter

Which everything eventually comes back to.


Paganism

Gimme that real old-time religion.


Family Guy

Whose leg do I have to hump to get a dry martini around here?


"Writer's Block"

Ask a sillly question, get a brianthedog answer.


"The cat!"

A most amazing and useful quadruped. Just ask Colin Mochrie.

12:20 pm - Writer's Block: Gifted Ideas

12:42 pm - Socialists disavow Obama. And the earth is still round.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/dfns-o30.shtml

To the Republicans: NOW will you fucking believe me when I tell you Obama isn't a socialist?

12:17 pm - The meme goes on...

* Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."
* I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity
* Update your journal with the answers to the questions. Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions. (I'll also answer more, if asked.)


feedle asks:

1: I feel silly even asking this, but when did we first meet? What were your impressions (regardless of how wrong they were) of me?

We met at one of mistressprime 's Meetups. You were talking to work on on your cell phone often enough that I knew you were an IT geek, in the best sense of the word. I don't think I had any bad impresions. That came later (j/k)

2: Paper or Plastic?

Plastic. Environmental concerns aside, it's cheap, it's easy and you can reuse plastic bags several times whereas paper pretty much wears out after one use. YMMV.

3: What is your favorite book and/or author?

I must confess I don't read nearly as much as I used to. My time-sink of choice is teh Intenetz & has been since 1995. I did get into the Harry Potter series, rather surprisingly since fantasy is really not my thing, but I don't really have a favorite author for either fiction or non-fiction. If I see a book at B&N or wherever and it appeals to me, I'll buy it.

4: If you could meet any historical figure, who would that be?

This is gonna sound creepy, but I'd have to say Lee Harvey Oswald. If you've ever read anything about the JFK assassination beyone what's in the Warren Commission report, you know that LHO had a lot more depth than the rifle-toting nutcase he's usually portrayed as. He's even connected to a particular branch of neo-Paganism in a six-degrees sort of way.

5: Do these pants make my ass look big?

Uh...yeah, kinda.

11:44 pm - The REAL reason the Soviet Union collapsed.

Current Mood: silly

12:05 am

So I'm on my way to catch the 10:05 showing of "The Men Who Stare at Goats" at Edwards Aliso 20, and I'm running a tad behind but still not enough to miss any of the actual movie, just the previews.  Suddenly there are cars backed up for blocks, and traffic cones closing off two of the three lanes of traffic.  An accident?  Nope, a CHP sobriety checkpoint.

Thanks to the fact that I'm allergic to beer and seldom have a dinner fancy enough to require wine, I usually have no reason to be frustrated by these.  As I'm running a little late for my movie, the fact that I'm suddenly behind six blocks' worth of bumper-to-bumper traffic, for no reason other than the lordly whims of law enforcement, I'm a bit miffed.  Sure, it's a Friday night, but it's not even ten o'clock, and it's not even a holiday weekend.  How many drunk drivers are they expecting to catch?  Yeah, it's Laguna Hills, and the trap is set up in front of a shopping plaza popular with the local Hispanic community, but it's also right around the corner from Leisure World.  Why this particular location, at this particular time of evening?

The traffic crawls at geological pace toward the bright lights and the giant black-and-white truck, which but for its color could pass for one of the riot-control bulldozers in "Soylent Green". Finally I'm close enough to see a few of the checkpoint workers, who look like school-crossing guards in their yellow overalls and green vests as they stand on the landscaped median directing the flow (slow as it is) of traffic.  One of them holds a camera for mug shots and vehicle identification.  Two middle-aged Caucasian guys finish briefly talking to the driver of the pickup in front of me.  I look at the one nearest me, who holds one of those shiny red directional signal thingies that airport ground crews use.  No sooner do I look his way than he says "You can actually just drive on through. "  A bit surprised, I thank him and move on into the universe of vehicle-free road ahead.

OK, so that was quick.  I _might_ even get to the movie on time.   Two things puzzle me.  WHY was the traffic so glacially slow until I got there, and how was the guy who waved me through so sure I wasn't intoxicated?  Usually, pro forma, they ask you if (or if they're feeling particularly cocky, how much) you've been drinking that evening.  This guy didn't even do that.  He was too far away to see my eyes; I doubt he could even see far enough into my car to know whether my seat belt was fastened.  The lady with the camera had turned the camera's floodlight off, so my face wasn't brilliantly lit enough to see what my eyes were doing. There really wasn't much he could notice of me in so little time except...the color of my skin.

Now, if this had been the Border Patrol checkpoint in San Onofre, I could understand.  It's not 100% accurate, but having a pasty Anglo complexion corrrelates highly enough with U.S. origin that, given the volume of traffic on I-5, most ICE employees aren't going to ask for a green card if you look like Conan O'Brien without the tan :)   In a suburban area of south Orange County,  zoned primarily residential, this logic wouldn't seem to apply, and especially not to blood alcohol content.  I certainly don't object to being waved through after the unnecessarily long wait in traffic, but I'd hate to think that my WASPy features had anything to do with it.  Were some equally sober drivers ahead of or behind me delayed further just because they appeared to be more likely to be descended from Aztecs than Vikings?  Just what is the relationship of DUI arrests in Orange County to ethnicity when broken down as white/Asian/Latino?  Are we talking the talk when lambasting the LAPD for their recurrent problems with racism, when the local CHP units might be just as bad on this side of the Orange Curtain?
 

05:05 pm

Not sure, but I think I may have been the benficiary of reverse racial profiling.  Stay tuned.

Current Mood: curious

01:00 pm - Writer's Block: Take the pain away

09:53 pm - Please don't feed the Google.

So apparently, Google's cryptic 20th-anniversary tribute to Zero Wing (as in "all your base are belong to us") drew so much attention that, like a two-year-old throwng a tmper tantrum, they've decided to do it again, with similar results. 

An old journalism cliche axiom states "If a dog bites a man, that's not news.  If a man bites a dog, that's news."  Google changing their home-page logo to commemorate some event or holiday is a perfect example of dog-bites-man.  It's not news.  Just because the design du jour features a flying saucer does not require journalists to devote newsprint/bandwidth to discussing it.   This is Slashdot material, not AP.  We've seen it, we've thought about it for the five or so seconds it deserves, and then we moved on.  the mainstream media need to do the same.

Current Mood: tired

10:10 pm - Writer's Block: The truth is out there ...

02:15 pm - Writer's Block: Tips for a Beautiful Body

01:05 pm - Writer's Block: Thanks for the Input

10:06 pm - Writer's Block: Confidence Booster

01:51 pm - Writer's Block: Memo to Myself

01:09 pm - Writer's Block: Do Not Open Until 2059

03:16 pm - Writer's Block: Youthful Transgressions

11:52 am - Writer's Block: Total Eclipse of the Sun

11:09 pm - Writer's Block: Fashion Forward

10:30 pm - Star Trek: The Loose "Canon"

OK,  I saw "Star Trek" last night, and it didn't suck.  It had everything a good space opera should have.  I only have one question:  why doesn't the story take place in the Star Trek universe as we know it?

Before I get down to nitpicking, I've got to give credit where credit is due.  In case it doesn't go without saying, HERE BE SPOILERS.
DO NOT READ ANY FARTHER IF YOU HAVE NOT YET SEEN THE MOVIE.  (Of course, if you don't plan to see the movie then go right ahead.)

We get some good backstory right from the get-go.  There's the birth of James T. Kirk, scenes from his childhood in Iowa (which apparently won't change much over the next 300 years :)) , and scenes from Spock's childhood on Vulcan, including the kids who bullied him in school (think Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle with pointy ears.)  The action scenes and special effects smite major gluteus maximus. The rest of the familiar characters--McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov and most notably Uhura--are all introduced in a manner which is always entertaining if not entirely (ahem) logical. 

That last sentence is an understatement.  The characters are actually introduced (and in at least one case, summarily dispatched) in ways that will make any real Trekkie/Trekker scream foul.    In sum...

(1)  Exactly where in canon do Spock and Uhura have a thang goin' on?  Anyone with a microgram of geekitude knows that Ensign Janice Rand had it bad for Spock in the original series (remember the plomeek soup in "Amok Time"?), and there were other ladies  who definitely wondered if big ears meant big, uh, earmuffs.  But Uhura???  She never gave him a glance throughout the original series, yet here we see them sucking face like there was no tomorrow.  And this is supposed to be BEFORE Kirk took command.
So where in the timeline does effort at interplanetary relations fit in?

(2) Actually, timelines in this plot are created and destroyed with such reckless abandon you half expect to see Marty McFly drive up in a DeLorean.  When the Enterprise crew figures out that a renegade Romulan is about to destroy Vulcan. Mr. Spock has just minutes to rescue his parents.  But just as the Enterprise is about to beam the three of them up, the ground crumbles away, the transporter loses its lock on Spock's mother, and she does a half-gainer with a quarter-twist into the black hole that's nomming on the planet.
Now, since we know Kirk meets Spock's parents--BOTH of them--in the original series episode "Journey to Babel", we know that Amanda can't really have gotten sucked into the plot black hole, right?  Even if she IS being played by Winona Ryder?  I mean, this is freakin' Star Trek!

Well, tough.  Neither Amanda nor the other six billion of Spock's compatriot's ever make a comeback.  Even when we find out that a later adventure of Spock's DID create an additional timeline (complete with an older version of Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy hs damnself). the story's climactic events--which include a black hole, an event horizon and all the Hawkingesque space-time squinkiness that comes with them--don't do squat to restore Vulcan to the sky or Spock's people to pointy-eared plenitude.  Leaving True Fans to wonder just how the hell Capt Kirk is supposed to have that future meeting with Spock's parents, let alone get himself damn-near killed at Spock's wedding in Season Two.

It could be argued that these are minor points and should not hinder me or anyone else from enjoying what should be a fine homage to the original series and its beloved characters.  And it didn't, not completely.  i definitely had time to notice what a dead ringer the actor who plays McCoy is for DeFprest Kelly, or how much better Scotty's accent sounds now that he's played by someone who's actually from Scotland.  I'm glad that they actually took the time to acknowledge the campiness of the original series; it shows they know their audience.  Which makes the WTFery with Spock and Uhura and the whole destroying Vulcan thing (and don't get me started on Young Spock and Old Spock) that much harder to understand.  Someone at Paramount needs to look up "sine qua non" and learn how it applies to  the concept of "universe" in fiction before production starts on the next sequel.  I mean prequel.  I mean...meh. You figure it out.

Current Mood: confused

12:27 pm - Writer's Block: My Biggest Environmental Pet Peeve