The Book Thingy

Props to Joe for removing this question from Facebook, where everything of this nature is somehow irritating. "Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen novels you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes." I'm going to bend that 15 minutes rule, because I have a terrible memory for such things.
So, in no particular order:

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Monty Python: Just the Words
OK, one of these is a book of TV scripts, but I read both obsessively as a kid; gave me a sense of English identity, which was nice since I had an English accent, but only lived there 'til I was six.

Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Maybe this resonated more with me, reading it after Mom died, but this book blew me away.

LA Confidential, James Ellroy
I read most of his stuff, and it's all great, but this one is the most spectacular display of the 50s LA in Ellroy's (sorta messed-up) head. Part of me wants to swagger around that Los Angeles, planting evidence and beating confessions out of bad guys.

Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut
I loves me some short stories. I only remember the one where the strong and beautiful were weighed down and uglified so that all were equal, and the one where the guy was forced to play chess with people. I should read it again.

Elements of Style, Strunk & White
Omit needless words.

Maus, Art Spiegelman

All of his children's books, Roald Dahl
So brilliantly subversive; no better way for kids to learn that sometimes adults are fallible dicks.

Nikolai Gogol
Can't remember the name, it was the first short story in a collection I grabbed around freshman year. It was a fairly standard fairy tale, but things weren't going well, and I kept expecting things to turn around, and kept checking how many pages were left, and got to the end, and holy shit things never turned around. After growing up with western storytelling, it was a big shock to read a story where everything turned to shit and stayed that way.

Level 7, Mordecai Roshwald
Anti-Nuclear war fiction written by a professor in 1959. Another high school library find. I had a big military, Tom Clancy, Top Gun kinda kick in middle/high school, and this was one of the things that made me realize that war isn't as sexy and cool as I had been lead to believe. Holy craps, Wikipedia says he lives in Silver Spring. We were neighbors for awhile!

The Shell Collector, Anthony Doerr
Can't find my copy, all I remember is the story about people displaced by Chinese dam construction had this amazing imagery of the setting and weather, and I felt like I was there just reading it.

Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Idiot, Al Franken
One of the greatest, angriest, most vindictive works of smart-assery.

Nine Stories, JD Salinger
Salinger had this amazing ability to make the most mundane settings and events completely captivating, and at times crushing. Again with the short stories, but I love all his stuff.

The Long Walk, Stephen King
I've always liked King, but I'm not big on horror, so I'm always happy when he explores other genres. And I do enjoy his penchant for futuristic blood sport game shows. This one really struck me as a teenager; I could've been any of those kids, marching along for money and fame, getting shot for falling behind.

Hm, I think that's only 14. Bonus not-a-book! Joe's big religion sucks revelation was CS Lewis, mine was the song Tomorrow, Wendy by Concrete Blonde.

I told the priest, don't count on any second coming /
God got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slumming /
He had the balls to come, the gall to die and then forgive us /
No I don't wonder why, I wonder what he thought it would get us

Pretty shocking stuff for a young, generally oblivious preacher's kid, and the first thing that made me question religion.

OK, back to that midterm.

Pictures What I Took With My Telephone Device

I'm not sure how easy this is to see, but the first picture is a hose that attaches to your car's exhaust pipe, and you pump CO into the mole hole, killing them with one of the more popular 20th century suicide methods, apparently because it's cheaper than a tiny gas oven, and easier than tying adorable little nooses.

This country's so fucked up.

Say it with me: bo-de-ga

The (3rd party) app store for OS X is called Bodega? Seriously? I feel worse for Microsoft, though; assuming that Bodega was the best available option, if they start their own app store (And why stop ripping off others' successful ideas now?) I do believe they'll have to settle for Creepy Old Guy Selling Tiger Rugs Out Of His Van as a name.

Well Fine Then, I Didn't Want to Bleed Anyway

Yesterday I saw that a mosque in SW was raffling nice Blazers preseason tickets for those who participated in their blood drive, and I thought I like free tickets, and have sorta been meaning to start up with the blood-giving again, so I made an appointment for this morning. (After reading up on the mosque; don't wanna end up in Gitmo 'cause a pint of my B+ was found with Terrorists, and I'd always been curious about it as I used to (be) drive(n) past it all the time when I was a kid, the one on 35th Dr just south of I-5 and Barbur. Turns out they're Ahmadiyya, a peace and love branch of Islam that, naturally, none of the other branches like. They're A-OK in my book, though. Now how to get out of this parenthetical...) So I went there and got the pre-bleed literature to look over, and as advised tucked into some of the tasty Indian food and cookies, and flipped through the lit, no hep-B treatment, haven't been raped, haven't gotten it on with dudes from Equatorial Guinea... But. I have spent more than three months in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1996. 79 months more, roughly. And the thing is, I stopped giving blood during the whole mad cow scare, even though at the time the people calling me from the Red Cross couldn't've cared less, because I wouldn't've been able to live with myself knowing I'd turned someone's brain into a sponge, but I thought we were all kinda past the whole spongiform encephalitis thing now, so I went there, and now they've finally caught up to six years ago. Oh well. I'm still in the running for the tickets, apparently, 'cause I showed up, but I'd feel kinda bad if I won. I never win anything, so it'd figure if the one time I did it came with a moral quandary.

Oh! Also, I went to get some bagels from Noah's after that, and on the way back I took a picture of this guy with the boombox, bumpin' L'Trimm's Cars With The Boom (hilariously miscategorized all over the internets as being by Le Tigre). So y'know, it wasn't a total wash.

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The Madness of Mel Gibson

So Syd and I caught part of Lethal Weapon 2 and then the end today, and it was so much more stupid than either of us remembered (among many other things, at the end he stabs the bad guy after a big fight, and staggers away, and the bad guy pulls a gun and is about to shoot Mel in the back, but oh they're in the cargo hold of a ship and Mel reaches one of those industrial buttons on a rope and presses it and one of those shipping containers falls and crushes the guy), and then The Patriot was on and Mel was all fuckin' crazy killin' a Limey with pudding for blood with a hatchet and stuff, and watching it all I could think of was South Park's Mel Gibson, jumping around in his underwear and Braveheart facepaint all crazy-like, and then Syd said, how many movies has he been crazy in? And it was such a fine question, we decided to find out. We've excluded TV and uncredited roles (except for the one where he's credited as Anger Management Therapy Patient), and since it's acting only, we don't even get to consider Apocalypto or Jesus: The Snuff Film*. Still, plenty of material left. Also, his character in What Women Want is kinda nutty, hearing women's thoughts and all, but not in that South Park kinda way, so I'm not counting it. Crazy is in bold, not crazy in a soothing blue, and the rest we aren't sure about, so feel free to comment if you've seen Payback or something, or if you disagree with our classifications.

# Paparazzi (2004) (uncredited) .... Anger Management Therapy Patient
# The Singing Detective (2003) .... Dr. Gibbon
# Signs (2002) .... Rev. Graham Hess (Pretty sure he wore a tinfoil hat)
# We Were Soldiers (2002) .... Lt. Col. Hal Moore
# What Women Want (2000) .... Nick Marshall
# The Patriot (2000) .... Benjamin Martin
# Chicken Run (2000) (voice) .... Rocky
# The Million Dollar Hotel (2000) .... Detective Skinner
# Payback (1999/I) .... Porter
# Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) .... Martin Riggs
# Conspiracy Theory (1997) .... Jerry Fletcher # Ransom (1996) .... Tom Mullen
# Pocahontas (1995) (voice) .... John Smith
# Braveheart (1995) .... William Wallace
# Maverick (1994) .... Bret Maverick
# The Man Without a Face (1993) .... Justin McLeod
# Forever Young (1992) .... Capt. Daniel McCormick
# Lethal Weapon 3 (1992) .... Martin Riggs # Hamlet (1990/I) .... Hamlet # Air America (1990) .... Gene Ryack # Bird on a Wire (1990) .... Rick Jarmin # Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) .... Martin Riggs
# Tequila Sunrise (1988) .... Dale 'Mac' McKussic
# Lethal Weapon (1987) .... Sergeant Martin Riggs # Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) .... 'Mad' Max Rockatansky
# Mrs. Soffel (1984) .... Ed Biddle
# The River (1984) .... Tom Garvey
# The Bounty (1984) .... Fletcher Christian Master's Mate
# The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) .... Guy Hamilton
# Attack Force Z (1982) .... Captain P.G. (Paul) Kelly
# Mad Max 2 (1981) .... Max ... aka Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (USA)
# Gallipoli (1981) .... Frank Dunne
# Tim (1979) .... Tim Melville
... aka Colleen McCullough's Tim (Australia: complete title)
# Mad Max (1979) .... Max
# Summer City (1977) .... Scollop
... aka Coast of Terror

So 35 movies, at least 16 screamy lunatics, 7 not, and 12 maybes. Even if all the maybes end up in the not column, that's still 46% of his film roles. We're pretty sure we can attain a majority, but not at the expense of watching these ourselves, so help us out. For Mel's sake!

* Link to Passion of the Benny Hill, the only version I've seen or want to see, and a great way to get the gist while not being scarred.

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In memoriam

So I was about to hop on my bike, which I'd just extracted from the back of the car, when I saw a little brown spider hanging from the handlebars. "This doesn't work for me," I said to the spider, and I picked him up with an empty soda bottle and set him down in the parking lot, today at 12:45 pm. It is now 1:10, and it's 80°, on its way to the mid-90's, and I did not set him in the shade, so, y'know, it turned out to be very hot on the ground. He ran around in a couple frantic circles for five seconds, tops, and then died. And even though I've killed hundreds of spiders, I feel really bad about it. I did not mean to burn you to death on hot blacktop, little spider. Life is pretty great; sorry I ended yours.

Doctoral candidates looking for an institute of higher learning, look no further! Behold the pop-up that was revealed to me in a moment of not-Firefox-using:


Because nothing says prestigious school like the offspring of a giraffe and Jar Jar Binks. Doctoral! Doctoral? Doctoral. I actually clicked the ad, just for you, dear reader (Hi Syd!) and it listed a bunch of degree mills, University of Phoenix and its ilk. So next time someone says they went to U of Phoenix, just conjure up that mental image of Dr. Bongrip Girafferton.

It's...sexy?

OK, so how has two people in two neighboring old bathtubs become the official logo of dick-pill manufacturer Cialis? Is that supposed to have anything to do with doin' it? S. and I were baffled when they first aired those ads: How'd they get those tubs there? How long did it take them to fill them with water that cannot possibly be not cold? It's more reminiscent to me of those human farms in The Matrix than anything else, and that is very unsexy.
Doesn't a hot tub make more sense for their veiled allusions? Shouldn't I argue this in SAT question format?
A hot tub is to two old adjacent bathtubs as
a) a bed is to your grandparents' two twin beds.
b) one of those panel vans with the little any-given-Lucky Charms-marshmallow-shaped window is to the Adam West Batmobile.
c) salmon spawning are to your old pet fish and the new fish still acclimating in its plastic bag.










˙ƃuıʇsǝɹǝʇuı ʇɐɥʇ ɹɐǝu ǝɹǝɥʍʎuɐ ƃuıɥʇʎuɐ op ɹǝʌǝu llıʍ ɥsıɟ ɯnıɹɐnbɐ ɹnoʎ puɐ 'suɐʌ lǝuɐd ǝsoɥʇ ǝsn sʇsıdɐɹ ʎdǝǝɹɔ ʎluo ˙ɐ sı ɹǝʍsuɐ ʇɔǝɹɹoɔ ǝɥʇ

Not again

It's time for another biking post! The Biking Commute Challenge Thingy is almost over, and I've biked 15 out of a potential 19 days of work thusfar. (I felt something pull or tear or tweak just above my right knee starting out in too high a gear right at the beginning of the month, so I took a little break, until I realized that it actually hurt more to work the gas pedal.) There are a few people with 100%, but I think I'll take the total mileage crown, which I am hoping involves an actual crown, but which probably consists of nothing. I got some raingear, but so far I've only needed the gloves, as it's been surprisingly dry, if foggy and windy. That reminds me:

Pete's List of Bicycling Things What Suck (Amended 9/27/08):
Hills
Headwinds

So here are yesterday's numbers:
Total Miles: 534
Total Peddlin' Time: 42 hrs. 50 min.
Trip Dist.: 18.58 miles
Trip Time: 1 hr. 25
Avg. Speed: 13.15
Top Speed: 31.94

Yep, 32 mph coming down the 33rd ramp over Columbia. I'll have to try again on Monday, though, 'cause I swear I hit the exact same speed at the same place on Thursday.

The End

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Sigh

So I thought I had a nice little idea for a retarded post about Sarah Palin, and her being the first ever VPILF. Turns out not only am I too late, there's a goddamn website: vpilf.com. There's even a post about the foresight in setting that site up two months ago.
Aha! No google hits for LOLVPILF. My niche!


Comedy gold.

PS Yeah I know, I can't figure out how to do a black outline.

::UPDATE::
Here's Syd's submission, and she's right, it should just be LOLVP:
















And here's mine:

We're puerile

Highlight of the 'lympics thusfar: the opening ceremony, beating France's ass in the relay, or the fact that Bulgaria has a male volleyball player called Gaydarski? It's a tough call...

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My feet, annotated

I swear we just vacuumed.

Footwear

So my shoes were shot to hell and I actually had some spare cash, and I was tired of playing basketball with my students in running shoes, so we willingly engaged in shoe shopping. I’m pretty finicky about every possible aspect of shoe purchasing, which makes for frustrating times. I eventually settled on some Adidas that didn’t look totally retarded, which I find to be an issue with 95% of shoes, but the weird thing was that the whole time I was worried about the opinions of my class. I’ve always been surprised by the lengths they go to to keep their “kicks”* nice; getting a couple sizes too big and stuffing socks in the toe; avoiding grass; meticulously scrubbing... I should be glad that they take care of nice things, given their often dire financial situations, but it’s so unexpectedly prissy. So along with my concerns of retarded shoes and shoes that didn’t feel right, there was a little voice saying “get some Jordans, or some Forces.” The trouble, of course, was that I had no damn clue which were tight and which were swap. So it was not without some small measure of apprehension that I wore my new shoes to school today, and as should come as no surprise, nobody commented on them at all.

*Slang for shoes.

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Mo' bicyclin'

I bade the MAX farewell this week, thanks partly to the cyclometer-facilitated realization that it only cuts the ride roughly in half, and takes no less time than riding the whole way. Monday and Tuesday I rode, tagging along with a couple of coworkers some of the time. More painful, but good to have impetus to keep going, and go faster, as they're in better shape than I. I was developing this habit of stopping when things got difficult. Took a break and drove Wednesday, and rode again Thursday (I have Fridays off in the summer. This only slightly mitigates my job's sucking.). 18-19.5 miles all three days, avg. speed 12 mph (it doesn't count time spent not moving toward avg speed or trip time), max. speed 25.71 (riding the brakes down the Alameda ridge), total odometer 78 miles, which doesn't include, obviously, distance traveled before I got the thing. Whee, geeking out with basic telemetry!
Syd rode some too, but was stymied by insufficient panniery, so I'm gonna slap a basket on the front of her bike today.

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Woo Bicyclin'!

So here's this week:

• Monday: MAX in the morning, rode back from work via 33rd.
• Tuesday: MAX in the morning, rode back via Vancouver.
• Wednesday: Legs were not interested in bicycling. So very not interested.
• Wednesday night: went to REI, got super-cushy seat for Syd, water bottle holders, and a cyclometer for me, since I needed a clock, and it tracks a bunch of other interesting stuff, like current, average and max speed, distance traveled, time traveled, and odometer and total time.
• Today: MAX in the morning, turns out I still bike about 4 miles with MAX, so it cuts the biking in half. Rode back via Vancouver, stopped to get a little Allen key kit because it turns out I didn't tighten Syd's new seat enough and it shifted angle quite significantly halfway through her morning commute, rode to Syd's work, fixed her seat, and we rode home. Total distance almost 16 miles, how crazy is that? My legs felt a lot better, too. I still had to stop a couple of times partway up some hills, but I think that's partly 'cause I wasn't picking a good gear, 'cause when I started back up it went much more easily.

Things I still suck at:

• riding with weight off my arms, or hands off the handlebar, which is to say:
• signaling, and the faster I'm going the harder it is. I would like to be one of those cool people who can ride with their arms at their sides all cool-like.
• Inclines. You win again, gravity!
  

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Vegas! Sorta.

So, I was gonna post my impressions of the Summer League games, for the benefit of Beau and Ben and anyone else without Comcast, and who might be desperate enough for information to rely on my uninformed meanderings. But you are all deprived of said ramblings, as I only watched the first quarter (conclusion: the Blazers can't shoot!) and then S and I went on a bike ride to try out her new bicycle. She likes that it's green, and has swept-back handlebars for the upright-sittin', and I like that it's assembled and sold by godless communists. Also, I rode all the way back from work today! It's 8.5 miles! It took an hour! I carried my bike up a hill to avoid an uphill cloverleaf and almost fell back down it! It is probably not the best idea I have ever had!

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Support local business

I heartily recommend the dude with the big beard selling cherries out of his pickup. $3 a pound for those pinky yellow ones, $5 for bing, and he welcomes bartering, and his truck broke down today so AAA towed him here, and that sucks, so anyway, if you need some tasty organic cherries, and you're in SE, I'm assuming in the afternoon/early evening, you might could buy some from him.
Also, I'm riding that bike I've been trucking around for the last few years! How about that. It's a lot easier than last time I tried to start. In retrospect, that's probably because NW is not the best place to break oneself in, what with the living a little way up a hill. So I've ridden down to and around the waterfront a couple of times, and the ambition is to commute once school starts up again next week, which is around nine miles each way. And then maybe one day I'll be as cool as Katie and Joseph.

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Holy cats!

People! Micky Dolenz was the voice of Arthur in the first season of The (animated) Tick! He also claims to be the current voice of the Snuggles bear. I have no cause to doubt him.
Señor Llama did a--uhh, what's that word for teaching?--pedagogy post or two, so I feel like I should chip in, but the catch is that Joe's students want very much, as paying clients, to learn, and my students very much do not. I'm getting better at algebra; their gains are less apparent. I even did guitar lessons for a couple guys as an incentive a few months ago, but they weren't interested in learning; they wanted to be able to play or, failing that, dick around. So after a few lessons and still no E chord retention (and then the other teacher's aide getting injured and us being down a staffperson) the lessons petered out. It's not all bad news though: I've gotten a lot better at basketball. I can beat some high school students, some of the time!

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Candy...for breakfast?

So we got some Indiana Jones promotional cereal, 'cause now we don't have to see the movie. The front has a guy who sorta looks like Harrison Ford 25 years ago:


On the back we find present-day Harrison, failing to not look ridiculous, collecting his check, wondering what the fuck happened.


SPOILER ALERT:
Here's what the Temple of Akator looks like.

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So when you're at the cineplex, and Indy gazes upon the splendor of a building that looks like a Dorito, now you'll know.

Oh, the cereal. Almost forgot. Cocoa Puffs with Lucky Charms-ish "marshmallows". Not that bad, really, if you're looking for some empty breakfast calories, and don't mind the subconscious impression that you're eating dog food.

Fred Meyer's Experience

So last week I was in line at Freddy's, at the entrance near our place, which has one checker who runs a checkstand and three self-checks. We at the checkstand were held up by some dude trying to buy a pack of Beyond Seven prophylactics, whose coupon wouldn't work. I relay this to you because Syd ordered me to, as she found it amusing. The guy handled it well, didn't turn red or pee himself or any of those other embarrassing, common condom purchasing mishaps, no doubt because of his apparently above-average wang. I know, this can't compete with the majesty of Joe's bonerstravaganza, but it's the best I could do.

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