gravitrue's Journal

1:01pm: Well, there's a bomb scare in Manhattan right now someplace on Lexington Ave; I have some relatives caught in traffic at it. I'd like to know the extent of the traffic lossage. news.google.com has no info, cnn nothing, so how in this age of information everywhere does one actually get news?

9:25pm: From last week...

oneagain"A_____ told me that his cow tried to mount him once. Didn't she know she was female (and that he's a human and she's a cow and it like wouldn't work)?"

gravitrue"Maybe she's a bull dyke."

1:07am: Sit rep, and some requests
For those who haven't heard, my dad has about 9 months at the outside, probably less, and I'm spending most of my time in New Jersey and NYC helping out.

When you see me, I am likely to be a ball of stress in need of hugs. I may be distant, I may tell you I love you, I may overshare. This may go on quite a while; please ration your compassion so that there'll be some left if I'm still in this five or eight months from now, as I doubt this will get easier.

I may make LJ posts referring to trivia of my childhood; please try not to be too bored. These details are what make a life, even when, like Rosebud, they aren't significant to anyone else.

I am able to check LJ only sporadically, there isn't enough time to really keep up. So if anything you think I'd really want to know comes up, send me some mail.

For those that don't read her, oneagain is in meditative retreat for probably a couple of months; don't expect to hear much from her. I may make it to Baitcon, I may make it to Firefly.

Thanks, everybody.

2:37am: transitions
At midnight, I watched two TV stations go away for good. Fox 5 showed the Simpsons and just cut at the end of the credits. WABC 7 was showing some drama, had a line of text cycling under the picture saying something like "URGENT! If you are seeing this message then you are not ready for the digital conversion! Programming will no longer be available on this channel after 11:59 PM Call 800-FCC-CLUE for more information" but cut almost as suddenly; the signal went through a sort of soft grey static for a second before going into full random noise.

WCBS 2 and WNBC 4 are still on the air, looping a five minute program over and over again explaining about what antenna is needed to get the new signals, the converter box coupon program, etc. NBC alternates English and Spanish versions. The program itself says in English that a Spanish version will follow, but CBS is just playing English over and over.

There's a cute 5" black and white combo TV/radio here. It's 25 years old and totally analog: one knob on the side does AM, FM, UHF TV, and VHF TV. It can be run by 6 "D" batteries or plug into the wall. It's strange to think that in a few minutes, that little CRT will become a quaint useless appendage to what will be an oversize retro-looking radio.

But wait! I looked over in UHF land, and there are two low power stations left doing their usual thing. Turns out that LPTV stations don't have to convert. Channel 60, W60AI, is the Home Shopping Network, the other, WMBQ-CA, is showing Christian rock.

Since those LPTV stations could stick around indefinitely, it is now a radio with a multimedia capability to sell you stuff and save your soul.

2:20am: If anyone has a movie projector that can handle 8mm (either or both of double-8 and super-8) it would be great if I could borrow it for a bit. Located around Boston or NYC or North Jersey would be ideal.

6:30pm: My father notes that the 15th floor patio full of patients taking in the sun and wind looks like a forest, the IV towers all in a grove, leaved with their transparent bags. Periodically, someone's pump will sound an alarm; dad proposes a symphony could be composed, though I think it would probably be more melodic if they did not all make the same sound.

8:26pm: Boltbus note
About 2/3 of the way back on a BoltBus bus on the starboard side is a wheelchair lift. It may be useful to know that the rows of seats surrounding the lift do not have power outlets.

(For non-northeast corridor folks, BoltBus is one of about six bus lines competing for the NYC to Boston run. Two of these are mainstream: Peter Pan and Greyhound. Two are Chinese, and run to NYC's Chinatown (from where you can get buses to Philly Chinatown, and probably DC as well). The others are Megabus and Boltbus, which run to midtown near Penn Station. By not using NYC's main bus terminal (Port Authority), they can run cheaper service. Both offer wifi, Boltbus has power outlets, leather-like seats with seatbelts, cupholders, and no customer service phone number (they really want you to buy your tickets via the web). I think Megabus runs more buses, and are easy to deal with by phone. Their tiny bathroom lights are often out of service, so bring a keychain flashlight, and men might want to sit down to pee, as the sway of a moving bus can seriously mess up your aim. I have not yet checked the lights in the Boltbus bathroom. )

I expect to be in and around NYC for most of two weeks, I'm not sure how much time for socializing I'll have, but feel free to ping me.

4:34am: Last Sunday's entry in the "things it never occurred to me I might see until I did" department was Kris Kristofferson and Ani DiFranco singing "Hole in the Bucket". Oscar the Grouch and Tom Chapin singing "Garbage!" was much less surprising.

( Concert review follows... )

Tonight's most amusing musical experience, on the other hand, was merely a swing band doing "Violent Love" live. Since I mainly know the Oingo Boingo version of the song, hearing it done as swing is always funny to me.

3:09pm: Birthday Potluck, Tuesday May 5th
Come celebrate our birthdays with us!

Who: oneagain and me

What: Birthday Potluck

Where: A friend's place in Somerville

When: Tuesday May 5th, 5:30pm, and since it's a school night, we expect things will start wrapping up around 10pm-ish

Why: To celebrate my and oneagain's birthdays. Our birthdays are 3 weeks apart, so we chose a night more or less in the middle.

Though we are inviting many people, we have no idea how many will come. If you would like to invite someone, it's probably fine, just please ask us first.

We will be messaging the potluck server information and the address to folks who rsvp, so please do so because we would like to see you :)

1:18am: USPS Transubstantiation
My sister placed a book into a large envelope and mailed it to me, via USPS media mail.

When I opened the package about nine days later, it contained a U2 t-shirt.

I really dislike that band.

3:37am: As many of you know, http://www.snopes.com is the Internet's home for debunking (or validating) those pieces of email that get endlessly forwarded around the net; the Niemen-Marcus cookie recipe, Craig Shergold wants postcards, etc etc. We used to call these things fpp (frequently posted posts, pronounced "frepp"). Having had a few things forwarded to me by my mother over the years, I think I have gotten it across to her that she should perhaps check Snopes before forwarding random garbage all over the place.

I was somewhat surprised when she forwarded to me... an anonymous email message accusing Snopes of bias. I wrote up a lengthy response showing the gaping holes in the message and explaining why personally I trust Snopes more than I trust the New York Times.

Snopes themselves of course had coverage of the message.

Then it hit me. Maybe this was art!

The self-contradictory statements, the clumsy intimations of conspiracy, those personal details relating to the story, all carefully crafted to resemble a crappy piece of net.flotsam and irritate all the too-serious too-literal analytical types like me, creating dissension through undetected self-reference.

I'd like to believe that, but really I suspect it was just some moron.

6:54pm: The Best Thing Ever
Tell me about the best thing, ever.

The best thing ever is radio station WFMU, the longest-running freeform radio station in existence.

It's their annual two week pledge drive.
Could any other radio station make a pledge drive hilarious?

On the show I just listened to, one of the premiums awarded for pledging was a CD designed to teach your parakeet to belch and cough. It played those sounds over and over. They played some of it, while talking about how on commercial radio, DJs would get in trouble if they belched or coughed on the air. Mixed into the background for much of the last ten minutes of the show was a man's voice begging "Please!" every few seconds.

Then they played "Walk This Way", mashed up with a little rap and the voice crying "Please!".

Then they played their show theme, a 1950s calypso song about a bedbug who found "Muriel's Treasure".

The next show has started. The DJs are the station manager and the producer of the tv show "Monk". For every thousand dollars, they spin "The Wheel of Fate", which could result in the DJs having to be tasered, kiss, wear underwear coated in peanut butter, sing "American Pie", order a pizza, or other options. There's a tattoo artist standing by in the studio; the station manager is supposed to get a tattoo if they hit their pledge goal, he seems to be leaning towards a black Jesus, having ruled out "Romney/Palin 2012". Last year the producer got waterboarded.

Whoops, wheel of fate landed on the kiss. And these guys are pretty straight. One of the DJs is trying to convince the other to pledge a thousand dollars to get them out of it.

Last night I heard pledges come in from my home town, two towns adjacent to it, the town I live in, Australia, Austria, Miami, Seattle, Kansas, and tons of other places. Vic told me she saw one of their bumper stickers on a filing cabinet in Antarctica.

So tell me, what's the Best Thing Ever?

1:09pm: used tires?
I could use a set of tires and I'm feeling cheap.
Does anyone have any recommendations for places around Somerville (or as far as maybe Revere or Waltham) that sell used tires? It'd be cool if they can mount them, too, but if not I can have my usual garage do that... (and yeah, I'm checking Craigslist)

EDIT: tires acquired, thanks for the replies!

3:25am: New York Notes
At Sloan-Kettering Memorial, most employees are very nice, but some are very overworked and the system isn't particularly well organized. The art is pretty good, a lot of photography and at least two nice oil paintings. A call to the doctor's admin assistant kicks the system into performing the ultrasound just in time to get the ambulette sent from the rehab center. The EMTs, a handsome Latino man with a pony tail and a wedding ring and a lovely dark haired dark eyed young woman, let us ride along, holding the luggage as we climb in. It's my first time in one of these since Burning Man.

In Manhattan, the view backwards is less disturbing than in Nevada, but still not as comfortable as looking out forwards or sideways. The woman fills out paperwork in triplicate and chats with us while the man drives, later she asks him to crank the music for a song she hasn't heard in a while. My stepmother calls out streets as we transit them, craning to make out signs and spot buildings. We try to recall the relative locations of Stuyvesant Town and Cooper Village. At the rehab hospital downtown, my father lays in the gurney signing his name seven or ten times and being handed several dozen pages of paperwork while the EMTs cool their heels.

If I had to guess, I'd say perhaps 20% of their time is used in administrative overhead; liability and lack of interoperability in the medical system must consume an insane amount of US productivity, but I'm not sure what the alternatives would look like.

After our arrival, people parade in and out of the room every five or ten minutes, taking vital signs, weighing him, asking if he's eaten, bringing food, introducing themselves. It all seems to work, though no-one quite knows what anyone else is doing, has done, or will do.

One of the owners of Love Saves The Day has passed away, and with them, after 42 years, goes the store. But not to the same place; while the owner may live on on some other plane, the store lives on in New Hope Pennsylvania, which is probably not where dead owners of kitsch and tchotchke stores end up, although that would make for an interesting film.

Thus does the intersection of Second Avenue and Seventh Street lose all coolness.

Yet, mere steps away, sauerkraut and mushroom pierogi with apple sauce and sauteed onions are pulled from the fryer by the black man with dreadlocks and passed to the paper-pale Ukrainian who puts them on the the steel pickup counter. From there, they pass to the dark haired waitress, and then to my mouth, stomach, heart, and soul. My soul makes a sort of cash register ka-ching when this happens, and the world seems a much better place.

A high school acquaintance smiles at me from billboard on the side of a phonebooth as I walk north.

On 14th Street, Thais work for a Jew, making bowls of noodles with tofu as well as "the original Thai sandwich" at prices that are a relative bargain; less than ten bucks buys enough for almost two meals. And who can resist a place with the name "Thai Me Up" ? Certainly not I, visiting them twice in as many days.

The Lexington and L subways have new cars; gone are the lovely accented voices of conductors inaudibly calling out stops over scratchy intercoms, replaced by whitebread voicemail drones (whose primary distinguishing feature is a potentially irritating perkiness) speaking with perfect clarity, supplemented by four kinds of electronic signs, including one kind that has a row of lights showing every stop on the line, which blink as the train approaches a station and wink out when it has passed, and another kind on platforms that says when the next two trains will depart in giant readable glowing letters.

While these cars seem almost clean enough to eat off of, fortunately a few persistent artists have managed to tag them by scratching through the thick laminate walls. New York subway cars must have graffiti, otherwise you might as well move to Disneyworld or Singapore.

The poster graffiti still has lovely wit and bite, as the police recruiting poster displays the classic blacked out teeth as well as a talk balloon stating "I am the oppressor", and the ad for the vapid sitcom about women with nothing better to do than shop contains a brief socialist screed which includes the phrase "yuppie wh0res". Signs in the cars assert the Second Avenue subway will open in 2015, which would make it probably no more than sixty years late, but putting another north-south line in Manhattan is gilding a lily, idly installing perhaps 15% of Boston's entire subway capacity just because they can, and because they promised it back when they tore the elevated line down. Or maybe it's a carrot on a stick, Bullwinkle telling us "This time for sure!", a budget ploy, or perhaps a inside joke for MTA employees.

"42nd Street Ballroom" (a kinetic sculpture) sits dingy and unplugged, and finding the right gate for the buses is harder than ever, but the buses to where I'm sleeping run every five or ten minutes all the live-long day, slowing to a mere hourly trickle sometime after 1AM.

Once I arrive for the night, Solomon the cat makes a sad noise as he drags a fishing-rod toy to me. I dangle and drag it for him, eventually figuring out that in order for him to be satisfied, it must be over the blue shag carpet, thick as an unsheared sheep, which covers part of the living room floor.

I spend hours speaking of my father's life and character with my sister. I shall be late to bed. I hope that tomorrow I may acquire hamantaschen and ravioli.

3:19pm: How did anyone ever live without this?
Jellybean Reindeer. Just thinking of the people involved in making this makes me wonder. The person who convinced their boss that it would make money. The one who did the CAD layouts for the plastic molds. The one who convinced stores to carry it. The accountant who came home and told their spouse "Guess what I had to run the numbers on today?" The Chinese assembly plant workers who put the pieces together. All of these people generating money, making the wheels of the global economy turn. Economics is weirder than Ocean tides, but then most human endeavors are stranger than mere physics.

1:38am: Channel J: NYC public access cable
For a long time, New York City public access cable was the coolest thing in the world.

There was a show that was reminiscent of Wayne's World done by adult NYC Goths at 3 or 4am, just hanging around and trying to think of things to say.

One station, my roommate called it "the full frontal nudity channel", had commercials for escort services, and an awesome porn industry talk show hosted by a woman named Robin Byrd. She'd have on whatever people were in town to do live gigs at Show World (42nd Street's biggest porn palace) and they'd all sit around in folding chairs wearing lingerie or bikinis or briefs and talk for a bit about their latest films, and then dance to a ridiculous cheesetastic song called "Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box" while pantomiming having sex. The background glowed different colors with pulsing lights, often in yellow or orange shades.

One night, driving back from the Kiev Diner, frotz and I almost killed Robin; we came around a corner fast and she came in from the other side not seeing us; he braked and swerved just in time, she probably never even noticed. We knew it was her because her license plate number was the number for her phone sex line. We were happy we hadn't killed her, as she brought goofy porntastic joy into so many thousands of lives.

They also had a show about hidden male homoerotica in cinema, showing clips usually from various European b-movies with occasional voice-overs making pointed observations about things that today might be called "fan service". And a nude talk show hosted by a swinger couple. And the world's only televised weekly marijuana price watch.

But maybe the best thing on NYC public access was that back in the dawn of the net age, around 1995, late at night once a week they ran "The Prisoner" tv series with some space underneath (letterboxed? I don't remember). In this space, they showed a few lines of an IRC channel, so that anyone in NYC could join the chat channel and riff on the show and everyone else watching would see it, a Manhattan-wide MST3K. I love that media form, it should happen more often.

I'm sure in the post-Giuliani and digital cable age, NYC public access is no longer as cool, but having the net and cheap video gear means that it mostly doesn't have to be.

2:36pm: First good quote, and the party hasn't started yet...
GC: Anything else I can bring?
Gr: Well, I'm kinda paranoid about the carpets. Do you have any spot remover you could bring just in case? If I mess up my step-mom's rugs like I did in high school, I am so dead.
GC: Sure. Maybe you should have folks take off their shoes before they come in.
Gr: I don't think we have to go that crazy.
GC: How about we put down newspaper?
Gr: Maybe wood chips.
GC: That'd work; they're _so_ absorbent, and they smell good, too.

5:50pm: borrow video camera?
I'm holding a party for some high school classmates this weekend. Anyone near Camberville have a video camera and tripod I could borrow? I'm not picky about format; 8mm/Hi8, MiniDV, or hard drive all fine... (and VHS would actually be pretty funny).

10:01pm: Anything fun in Lowell on a friday afternoon or evening?
I'm planning to run an errand in Lowell Mass tomorrow night. As long as I'm going up there, is there anything fun to check out?

4:28am: looking for spare motherboard
I want to throw together a cheap server. I've got drives, case, power supply. Before I go poking on craigslist, if anyone has a spare motherboard+cpu combo kicking around that I could have, please let me know. Around 800 - 1000 Mhz speed is enough. I might have some ram, but if it came with, that'd be even better.

Thanks!

2:07am: Tim's Rules
Tim is a very good swing dancer. For the first two years he danced, Tim was shy and did not dance with anyone he didn't know. Then he formulated these guidelines.

Each time you go out dancing, try to dance with:

• one person better than you
  
• one person not as good as you
  
• one person who intimidates you
  
• one person who is new to swing
  
• one person you've never danced with before
  

Scoring one partner in multiple categories is permissible if necessary.

7:08pm: Honk!
As most of you locals know, this weekend is the Honk Festival in Davis Square.

I wrote up a summary of last year's Honk but never posted it, so here it is now...

( lj cut for your flow control pleasure... )

3:11am: Elephants across the Charles: A Photographic Practicum
Last night I got a whole lot of photo experience in a very short time.

( Last night was the night elephants walked down Memorial Drive and across the Charles River into Boston. )

6:17pm: outage
Well, my email system was down for over 48 hours this week (closer to 72), longest downtime in at least 7-8 years. So some of you may have gotten mail bounces. Sorry about that.

During the rebuild, I had the second geekiest dream I've ever had. There's a computer language called "make", whose main use is to take the components of another program and put them together. As I slept on a couch near the server closet, I dreamed that in order to sleep properly, I had to run the make program twice, and I was concerned that I had only remembered to do it once, and thus would only be able to sleep laying on one side of my body, and not the other.

Gory tech details: The rebuild was a total bear. It involved 8 motherboards (the original one that died, a stack of four biostars somebody gave me (3 of them DOA, one died after 12 hours), an old dell I have with a dead motherboard IDE controller, one DOA in an old box a friend handed me, and the box I ended up using, with a VIA C3 CPU in it) in 4 chassis, 8 disk drives (the original mirror pair, the upgraded mirror pair, the media and backups drive, an extra backup drive just to make sure, etc), a pile of RAM some of which may be dead and some of which may not work with some of the involved motherboards (one board seems to not support 512MB pc133 dimms, another can recognize them but not use them), 4 rescue/install disks (amazing how many won't boot on a VIA C3 or don't have the modules to deal with LVM over RAID), figuring out how to make lilo do a boot partition on lvm, and both backing up and then migrating several hundred thousand files to a new box, plus redoing years of customization (iptables, spam filters, cron jobs, log rotation, disk monitoring) on a new OS version. With faster hardware, I might have shaved nearly a day, but it was still a lot of work to do.

7:56pm: My latest horrible idea: installing a sound chip in an anal plug. It would say "Surprise! Butt seks!" I'm unclear if it should be button or pressure activated.

Actually, I think lots of appliances could say this catchphrase, or the shortened form "butt seks". Car horns for example, alarm clocks, and copiers each time they print a copy.