2006

There were 210 posts published in 2006 (this is page 11 of 21).

In Dreams

Dreams are so strange sometimes. I’ve had some odd ones the past couple nights.

Earlier this week, I dreamed of my childhood friend John Kern. Or more precisely, I dreamed that he had a sister named Starla. Starla Kern had won $1,000,000 doing something unusual (the details of which are now sketchy — winning a reality show? defeating Godzilla?), and that she was all over Portland-area news stations. They referred to her as “Starla Kern, formerly of Wilsonville”, and parenthetically mentioned that her brother, John, had ghost-written Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. (In non-dream life, John has served aboard submarines.) After the big to-do, I bumped into Starla at an ice cream parlor, and we reminisced about old times.

But that’s nothing compared to what I dreamed last night.

I dreamed that we were with Jeremy and Jennifer, staying in a yurt at the coast. From the campground, we could hear the ocean. Kris and Jenn had wandered off to look at some foxglove while Jeremy and I tended the kids. He and I were seated around a campfire, drinking Jack and Coke. The kids were running up a bluff to a cliff that overlooked the sea.

“Be careful,” Jeremy said as he poured himself another drink. Hank and Scout laughed as they raced up and down the slope. Then, without warning, brother and sister joined hands and leapt from the cliff to the beach below. Emma landed first, and she rolled out on the sand, giggling. Harrison landed with a sickening crunch as his legs snapped beneath him. He began to scream. Emma began to scream.

“Damn kids,” said Jeremy, taking another sip of his drink. The screaming bothered me, though, so I went over to see if there was anything I could do. As I neared them, a giant crocodile sprang from the surf and charged the children. Emma moved aside, but Harrison’s legs were rubber. The crocodile gobbled him down.

“Jeremy,” I shouted, “a crocodile just ate your son.”

“Damn it,” he said. He got up and strolled over, drink in hand. The crocodile idled at the base of the cliff, a big grin on its face. I could hear Harrison inside, screaming. Emma was clinging to my pants and crying.

When Jeremy reached us, he handed me his Jack and Coke and marched up to the crocodile. He wrestled with its jaws, but the animal only got a quizzical look on its face, and then gobbled him down, too. Or mostly down.

One arm still protruded from the beast’s mouth. In a valiant feat of strength, Jeremy forced open the iron jaws. “My drink,” he gasped. “Give me my drink!” I walked over and gave him his Jack and Coke. He drank the entire thing before the jaws snapped close again. The crocodile winked at Emma (who was still crying) and then sank beneath the surf.

I wonder what I will dream tonight…

Download This Song

MC Lars publicly denounces the record companies:

I’m telling you, this whole thing — me sitting on my laptop posting this bootleg video from YouTube about music piracy (and outmoded business models) to my blog — is so 2006 that it hurts.

But this is the future, folks.

This is now.

[via the ever-prescient Andy Baio, who says this is old, but new to him — it’s new to me, too, and probably to most of you, as well — mas aqui]

I *heart* Rick Springfield

Tiffany is the best sister-in-law ever.

When she met us for dinner last night, she slipped a CD across the table to me. “What’s this?” I asked. The label read 80s Hits Stripped.

“I think you’ll like it,” she said. “It’s eighties songs done acoustic by the original artists.”

I do like it. Or most of it. We listened to it in the car on the way home. The first two songs didn’t impress me, but Men at Work (“Down Under”) and Asia (“Heat of the Moment”) were pretty good. And when Rick Springfield started strumming “Jessie’s Girl”, I squealed like a little girl.

I kid you not.

I took my hands off the steering wheel, squeezed them into fists, closed my eyes, and jiggled, squealing the whole time. I loved Rick Springfield (a.k.a. Richard Lewis Springthorpe) as a teenager. I am completely in earnest when I declare that he’s the most under-rated recording artist of the 1980s. His concert was the best I’ve ever seen.

Here, for your edification, until I am forced to remove it (please do not link directly to this file from your own web page), is a clip of Springfield’s acoustic “Jessie’s Girl”:

Rick Springfield – Jessie’s Girl (acoustic)

My favorite Springfield album was always Tao (five stars at Amazon, and containing songs like “Celebrate Youth”, “State of the Heart”, “Written in Rock”, and “My Father’s Chair”), but you might be more interested in his hits Working class Dog (with “Jessie’s Girl”, “I’ve Done Everything For You”, and “Love is Alright Tonight”), Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me yet (with “Don’t Talk to Strangers”, “I Get Excited”, and “What Kind of Fool Am I”), or Living in Oz (which gets five stars at Amazon and includes “Human Touch”, “Affair of the Heart”, and “Souls”).

Of course, there are always greatest hits collections:

While researching this entry, I discovered the Springfield is still making music. The Day After Yesterday, released in 2005, is an album of covers. Rick Springfield says, “[These] have been favorites of mine for a long time. They are songs I wish I’d written.” Tracks include I’m Not In Love (10cc), Under The Milky Way (The Church), Life In A Northern Town (Dream Academy), Broken Wings (Mister Mister), Human (Human League), Holding On To Yesterday (Ambrosia), Baker Street (Gerry Rafferty), Waiting For A Girl Like You (Foreigner), Let’s Go Out Tonight (Blue Nile), For No One (Beatles), Miss You Nights (Westlife), Blue Rose (Lizz Wright), Cry (Rick Springfield) and Imagine (John Lennon).

Rick Springfield covering The Blue Nile? I’m so there!

For more about my never-ending nostalgia for eighties music, check out:

Tune in next time when I’ll rave about Styx.

The Write Stuff

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. And if a person is defined but what it is they do most often, what it is they love, I have, at last, become a writer.

I spend several hours each day writing. I write for this weblog. I write for Get Rich Slowly (which, for good or ill, is now my main blog). I used to write for Four Color Comics (which is not dead, I promise). I write even more for my own edification. In fact, I’d guess that only about half of what I write is ever seen by anyone but me.

If you had told me a decade ago that I would be a writer, but not for traditional media, I would have said you were crazy. But that’s what has happened. Custom Box is still my day job — no question — but writing is who I am, what I do. (I’m even beginning to make a little money at it!)

I haven’t had much time to write during the past ten days. We’ve been busy with friends and yard work. Yesterday I had finally had enough. “I’m spending all day Sunday writing,” I told Kris. “I’m finishing my chores tonight, and then I’m going to sit at the kitchen table all day. Writing.”

And here I am. And here I’ll be twelve hours from now.

I am writing.

I am a writer.

A Little Digg

One of my sites just got dugg, but not in a good way.

Many of you are probably familiar with the social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and digg and furl. These sites allow users to share links to interesting sites with other people. Each site employs its own method of ranking the popularity of links.

Well, yesterday I thought a link that sennoma posted was funny and might make a good change of pace for my personal finance blog. It was a guide to winning things from a claw machine, one of those attractions you see in a supermarket. I posted a summary of the original article and went on my merry way.

This morning, when I came in from mowing the lawn, I checked my site stats to find an extra-ordinary number of visitors over the past hour. “What the hell?” I thought. Get Rich Slowly had received 4,000 hits from digg. “Maybe they linked to my article on choosing organic produce,” I thought. No such luck.

Somebody had ‘dugg’ the claw machine article, which had made it to the site’s front page (that’s apparently a big deal, as my traffic numbers reveal). And many digg users weren’t happy about it. Here’s a typical comment:

This guy sucks. He stole content from other peoples website and didn’t even credit them. Then linked his crappy blog to digg to get ad revenue. This is how this c*cksucker is getting rich slowly.

sigh

I registered for a digg account and posted a comment trying to clarify things, but it didn’t really matter. People had already made up their minds: I was a spammer, had posted my own link, was trying to get rich by google ads. They responded to my comment by telling me I was full of crap:

Beat it, spammer.

Oh brother. It’s not like a two-minute session with google wouldn’t verify I was telling the truth — I have a very public presence on the web. No, it’s easier to just make unfounded accusations and move on. The thing is, I shouldn’t even have dignified these bozos with a response. I forgot one of the cardinal rules of the internet, something I learned back on Usenet in the early nineties: Don’t get involved in flame wars.

I’m proud of Get Rich Slowly. I’m trying to make it a useful site for people who are working toward financial independence. I spend hours each day searching for useful information. It sucks for it to get some negative publicity, but I need to remind myself that this is a very, very small thing, especially considering the other feedback I’ve received has been uniformly positive.

And how much did I make in Google ad revenue from those 4,000 digg visitors? Less than two dollars. Here’s a question for you, diggsters: would I really sacrifice my own reputation and the reputation of my site for a couple of bucks? Maybe you would, but to me that sounds like suicide. I want this site to be strong in the long-term, to grow into something useful for many people. Why would I kill it in its infancy?

(Ha! I just checked the profile of the digg user who posted this. He’s the #28 user on the site, and has posted hundreds of stories, many of which made it to the front page. That makes this situation even more ludicrous. Regular digg users should recognize his name.)

Why do I let myself get worked up over little things like this?

Telemarketers are the Scum of the Earth

It is impossible to be too rude to a telemarketer.

*ring*

J.D.: Custom Box Service.
Cathy: [Cathy has a quiet, thin voice further burdened with a deep southern accent. Also, the line quality is poor.] Hi, this is Cathy from QwestDex Media. I’m calling for Mr. J.D. Roth. Is this Mr. Roth?
J.D.: It is.
Cathy: Hi. I’m calling to speak with you about how your business should appear on Google and Yahoo! Do you have a business web site?
J.D.: We do, but I’m perfectly capable of handling this all on my own.
Cathy: But, Mr. Roth…

*click*

I mean, really: what the hell is QwestDex Media going to do to affect how our site appears in search engines? Give me a break. In the past I’ve had conversations with other telemarketers about how I spend more time working with web sites than doing anything else. They don’t give a rat’s ass. They still want to sell me stuff.

Have I mentioned recently that I believe telemarketers should be shot? I don’t think so, but it’s true. I have no patience with them and their games. I loathe them. I generally just hang up on them, but sometimes I’m lulled into staying on the line. I’m never polite, that’s for certain. I once had a woman call back she was so angry at me. Must have been her first day on the job.

Earlier today:

*ring*

J.D.: Custom Box Service.
Brian: This is Brian from the Yellow Pages. I’m calling to update your free local listing. Are you still located at…
J.D.: You know what? I’m sick of this shit. We don’t do business over the phone. Mail me something.

*click*

Seriously. Just like that, with the “shit” and everything.

It is impossible to be too rude to a telemarketer. Don’t think of them as people. All they’re after is your money. All you’re after is for them to go away. (In fairness, I should point out that I believe my problems with Verizon stem from me having been rude to a telemarketer. Bastards.)

(I have a friend who is a telemarketer. I have to consciously will myself not to openly condemn him for this choice.)

The Long Weekend

Kris and I enjoyed a fun weekend with friends, though it wasn’t particularly relaxing.

On Saturday morning we hosted some Willamette friends and their children. We don’t see Chris and Cari or Michael and Laura as much as we used to. It’s great when we do; we enjoy their company. About twice a year, we gather for food and fellowship. This time, we hosted brunch. We’d hoped to be able to eat outside, but the week-long deluge prevented that.

On Saturday evening, we spent time with old high school friends. Dave and Karen came to dinner, and Mitch brought his kids. We ate hot dogs, played games, and talked about comic books.

My sister Shelley was in town Sunday, so the family gathered at Jeff’s house in Molalla. We had hoped to barbecue, but the very last of the rain kept us indoors again. Noah and Kendall were eager to clean up afterward:

By the time we took dinner to Craig and Lisa on Sunday night, the rain had passed. After dinner, I took Albert to the park. Or, rather, he took me to the park. He led me out the back door, down the alley (pausing only to look at a peculiar piece of gravel), down the sidewalk, and across the street to the park. He had me push him in the swing, but I couldn’t get him high enough to satisfy. I taught him how to walk up the slide backward, and how to go down on his stomach. We ran over to watch the pick-up soccer game. Albert gathered sticks. He hugged trees. He pulled moss from cracks in the sidewalk. Back at the house, we enjoyed some awesome chocolate pudding. Before we left, Craig showed us the progress on the basement.

On our way home, we stopped by Paul and Amy Jo’s. Paul gave us some of his posole (which, it turns out, is quite good).

Amy Jo gave me advice on writing, and loaned me a book about publishing non-fiction.

I had planned to do a lot of chores on Monday, but I got sidetracked. I’ve discovered that I love to prune. I’m not so fond of shearing hedges, but I love to lop off limbs and to prune for aesthetics. We have a several huge ungainly rhododendrons which haven’t been pruned in several years, so I spent three hours crawling beneath them, choosing which branches to prune and which to save. The largest rhodie took me ninety minutes to prune on its own. The plants look much better now, though they still need minor “haircuts”.

In the afternoon I joined Andrew and Tiffany for X-Men III. I had watched the first two films again over the weekend in preparation. My evaluations remain unchanged from first viewings: X-Men is pretty lousy and X-Men II isn’t a lot better (though it does have a few great moments). The first twenty or thirty minutes of X-Men III was fantastic, though; I was giddy with fanboy excitement at what I was seeing onscreen. Then the film bogged down — the plot stalled. The climax is a bunch of noise and nonsense (though I did love seeing Kitty Pryde — always my favorite X-Man (er, X-Woman?) — battling Juggernaut. (Aside: Enough Wolverine already! There should be a Federal law banning Wolverine from all media for a period of two years. Ugh.)

As I say: a fun weekend, and great to see so many people, but not particularly restful. I have a feeling that I’m going to spend the next couple of nights doing nothing. And loving it.

Further Tales from Rosings Park

What’s a typical May evening like at Rosings Park? Let’s take a peek…

It’s not raining when I get home from work. In fact, it hasn’t rained since mid-morning. I check the grass: it’s basically dry. I check the sky: it’s grey and ominous, but there’s no rain. I decide to risk it.

I set the mower wheels on high and start it up. I mow at light speed, nearly jogging. Even so, it’s a slow go — the grass is tall from all of the wet, warm weather. After just ten minutes, it begins to sprinkle. I continue mowing. A light rain comes and goes as I sprint through the tall grass. I mow the road lawn, the front lawn, the side lawn. I’m just about ready to start on the back lawn when there is a crash of thunder and the sky falls in. Rain comes down in a torrent. I park the mower under the maple by the back porch and go inside. So close! Another five or ten minutes and I would have mowed it all.

Kris comes home.

Our gutters, which were well-cleaned in January, have become clogged in the recent monsoons. I cleared the gunk from the lower gutter last night, but I wasn’t willing to brave the cold and the wet and the heights to clean the upper gutter. We stand at the kitchen window and watch the rainwater splutter-splutter from the top of the house onto Kris’ precious planter box.

In the spirit of “responsiveness”, I grab a stepladder and make for the roof. Simon helps. When I lean the ladder against the guestroom wall so that I can open the door, Simon climbs onto the bottom rung and wriggles his way to the top. There he surveys the room. He isn’t happy when Kris pulls him down. (You may recall that Simon loves ladders, as demonstrated by the following photo.)

Kris holds the ladder while I climb onto the upper roof. A single fat, waxy leaf is clogging the works. (Not much can reach the upper gutters. They’re very high.)

When I climb down, Kris is gazing longingly at her gardens. She loves her gardens. Sometimes I think she loves her gardens more than she loves me! “You should take a picture of the gardens,” she says. “I’ll go move the yard waste container.”

I grab my camera and snap a few shots, but can’t get anything framed that I really like. (“These pictures aren’t any good,” Kris tells me later as we are reviewing them. “You’ve cut off this plant here. And what about those roses? And we don’t need to see the lawn.” sigh)

While Kris and I are otherwise occupied, Simon has come outside onto the lower roof and scampered along a little outcropping to the balcony outside Kris’ office. We decide to let him have some fun, and so go inside to eat our dinner. When we come back up to get him, he is gone. Kris goes outside into the yard to see what she can see. What she sees is Simon, now on the upper roof, lounging away.

“How’d he get there?” I ask.

She looks at the balcony outside her office. “I have no idea,” she says.

I look at the area around me. It is conceivable that Simon might have climbed up a low, angled bit of roof. But to have reached the upper roof, he would have had to twist himself at an odd angle while jumping, similar to the way he had climbed the ladder earlier. I shudder at the thought. Any mistake and he would have plummeted to the camellia hedge below.

I go to Kris’ office and out onto the balcony. Here the situation is almost worse. The only way Simon could have made it to the roof was to make a six foot leap to a small platform above another camellia hedge. A tough jump for such a big cat. (From there, though, it would have been easy for him to scamper up.)

These are the only two routes he could have used. It’s difficult to conceive that he would have tried either of them, but apparently he did, because now he is lounging on the upper roof. I climb up the rickety ladder and call him over. He trots to me, tail tall and proud: “Look what I did!” He trills and even purrs at me as I pet him. But then I turn into Bastard Dad, hauling him down to the top step of the ladder (which is wobbling beneath me).

He stomps off to sulk in the bedroom.

His little brother, Nemo, is proud of himself for sneaking into the basement during the excitement upstairs. At dinner, I went down to fetch a bottle of salsa. I must not have fully latched the door. All three cats have a special sense that tingles whenever they approach an unlatched door. I don’t know what Nemo finds so exciting in the basement, but he loves it. He can spend hours down there. (No doubt he’s tearing open the spare cat food bag — that’s one of his hobbies.)

At the moment, Toto, my misunderstood daughter is sitting on the arm of my easy chair, purring and staring at my face. She wants attention. Every so often she reaches out a paw and gently claws my ear, pulling it toward her. Why? Because she’s a cat.

Kris is upstairs watching the Lost episode from three weeks ago via BitTorrent. She’s sad that we’ve forgotten to download last week’s episode, because it further goofs up her sequencing. Basically, if tonight’s two-hour finale contains episodes D and E, and the one she just finished is A, she will be watching them in this order: B-A-D-E-C. I hope she can keep that straight in her head. (Update after the fact: she could not keep them straight in her head. Apparently episode C contains critical stuff, because she was completely lost. She gave up and will have me download it for her later.)

And me? I will soon be taking a hot bath while reading The Wealthy Barber, which I hope to review soon at my personal finance site.

And that is a typical evening during springtime at Rosings Park.

The Da Vinci Crud

You gotta love Anthony Lane. The man is a comic genius. Check out his review of the The Da Vinci Code — both the film and the book — a review so deliciously scathing that I had to read it twice. And laughed at the same jokes each time.

How timid — how undefended in their powers of reason — must people be in order to yield to such preening? Are they reading “The Da Vinci Code” because everybody on the subway is doing the same, and, if so, why, when they reach their stop, do they not realize their mistake and leave it on the seat, to be gathered up by the next sucker? Despite repeated attempts, I have never managed to crawl past page 100. As I sat down to watch “The Da Vinci Code,” therefore, I was in the lonely, if enviable, position of not actually knowing what happens.

Oh, goodness.

I’ve tried to start The Da Vinci Code, too, but can’t make it past the first couple pages. They’re awful. Kris read it and pronounced it rubbish. It’s a shame that poorly-written stuff like this makes a gajillion dollars while better-written stuff languishes unread.

Alas.

What else does Lane have to say? Well, let’s see:

Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people, except at Columbia Pictures, where the power lunches won’t even be half-started. The Catholic Church has nothing to fear from this film. It is not just tripe. It is self-evident, spirit-lowering tripe that could not conceivably cause a single member of the flock to turn aside from the faith. Meanwhile, art historians can sleep easy once more, while fans of the book, which has finally been exposed for the pompous fraud that it is, will be shaken from their trance. In fact, the sole beneficiaries of the entire fiasco will be members of Opus Dei, some of whom practice mortification of the flesh. From now on, such penance will be simple—no lashings, no spiked cuff around the thigh. Just the price of a movie ticket, and two and a half hours of pain.

The Da Vinci Code: 23% at Rotten Tomatoes (11% from big-name critics) — that’s worse than RV or The Shaggy Dog.

Anyone surprised?

Think It’ll Rain?

Good grief.

Portland is the land of gentle mists, not these torrential downpours.

Driving home today, the rain was falling so hard that I had to slow to ten miles per. On the highway. Onncoming traffic seemed to float on a grey and foamy sea — the cars swam through the bouncing rain and through the thick pools that did not have time to drain from the roads.

At home, Simon asked to be let out. I offered, and he took a quick step down, but then paused. He looked up at me and dashed back in side. He can hunt birds some other time, he says. He does not like the rain.

The current shower has subsided so that I can see the vegetable garden: it’s flooded! And here I thought I would be able to mow the lawn today.

On Monday morning — after Sunday’s initial onslaught of rain — the drive to work was gorgeous. Low clouds hung over the Willamette River, clinging to the tree-lined hills. Perpetually in the distance stood a grey veil which divided me from the rest of the world.

Lovely.

But now the rain begins again in earnest. This is like Texas!