Stray Hawkeye

Do they have these at the State Fair yet?  How about now?  Now?

Via Craftzine

I don’t know what to say, other than I’m jealous I didn’t think of it first:

Anyone know where I can get the sheet music for that? And the flame thrower-esque sousaphone attachment?

As a side note, the cover of Britney Spears’ “Ooops I Did It Again” playing in the background is by Max Raabe.  He has his own orchestra (the Palast Orchester), and does lots of 1920’s German dance music style covers of pop songs (among his other work). Other favorites are his cover of Angel (by Shaggy), Super Trouper, Tainted Love, and We Will Rock You. I didn’t have much luck finding YouTube clips of these, but these two Amazon pages for the albums have little clips of them to at least give the flavor of it.

The Minnesota State Fair started today.  I don’t claim to be an expert on the fair by any means.  I went for the first time last year, and I will say the various fried whatever on a stick was wonderful.  I’m pretty sure I spent as much on an afternoon / evening of food there as I would have at a fancy restaurant, and I would totally do it again.  The deep fat fried pickles were way better than I expected, and the deep fat fried candy bar on a stick is much better if you let it cool just a little to a more gooey state if you get it fresh right out of the fryer.  Everything else is just sort of a blur of fried wonderfulness.

The other great part of the State Fair is, of course, the people watching.  Last year some co-workers and I took an afternoon off to go, and one of them forwarded us people watching fair bingo cards (pdf).  I have no idea where it came from originally, so I unfortunately can’t credit whoever it was that originally came up with it, just got it as an email forward.  It’s great, terrible, but great.  Not having been to the State Fair before, I mostly thought it was a joke.  Not so.  We forgot to print off cards before we left, but by the end we were pretty sure we were playing for a black out card instead of a simple line, and I think we all would have won pretty easily.

I’d like to meet someone who can type in such a way that the tapping noises the keys make are timed so that they convey the same message that the person is typing, but at about a third of the speed and in Morse Code.

- …. .- -   .– — ..- .-.. -..   -… .   -.-. — — .-.. .-.-.-

Via I can has cheezburger

Via I can has cheezburger

Via I can has cheezburger

I especially love that last one.

Cuddling chimps

This film on protein synthesis, created in 1971, is proof that the first few years of the 70’s got a contact high from the 60’s.  Wait untill about three and a half minutes in for the drugs to take effect.

Bet you never thought of the basic building block of life as tripping, dancing hippies with balloons taped to their heads before, did you?

1. NASA is apparently in the practice of dropping rubber duckies with Inuit tattoos into bottomless holes in the Artic.  It makes me laugh a lot that our national space agency, which sends people into outer space, uses rubber duckies to research glaciers.  (via Herd)
2. There is apparently also a bottomless hole at the end of half of a waterfall called the Devil’s Kettle, right here in Minnesota.  As much as I love scientific discovery, I also like the wonder from the fact that there are some really simple things like this that we don’t know.

Have I mentioned I’m quickly falling out of love with Google?

From Noise to Signal, found via Read Write Web

I have no idea if these things are any good at what they are, but I heard both the names lately and thought they were great names:

• The First Ammendment Art Gallery, an art gallery in north east Minneapolis (found via this article)
• Times New Viking, some band with a cool name that played in Loring Park recently

Two videos I bookmarked at different times, both because I’m sort of fascinated with resonance.  Strikes me that they fit pretty well together.

Metronomes on a board:

People on a bridge:

Such interesting parallels.  The way each metronome / person reacts to the result of the collective force generated by the individual movements of each of the others.  The mix of the purely physics-based and the physics / behavioral interaction.  The way, despite all starting fairly randomly, they all find their way to synchronization without trying to, just based on their interactions with their surroundings.  The way, in effect, each individual in the group exerts a tiny force on the group, and the group exerts its collective force on the individual until all individuals in the group are the same.  So many ways one could extend this metaphor / phenomena out to apply to other things.

Abridged scripts from the editing room are great 2-3 pages versions of popular movies.  And by abridged, I mostly mean 2-3 pages that narrate the plot and key scenes of the movie, while making TOTAL CRAP out of the MOVIE, while using STANDARD SCRIPT FORMATTING.

They’re pretty funny, especially for ones you’ve seen- most of them are mocking enough that you need to actually have seen the movie for them to make sense.  The Dark Knight is a pretty good one, though I’m not sure why they feel the need to make fun of Maggie Gyllenhaal, I think she’s kind of cute.

I just finished reading Requiem For A Dream (yes, it was a book before it was a movie), and I must say, it’s really good.  It’s a challenging read, for instance, Selby doesn’t separate what the characters say from the text around it with quotation marks, it’s just huge blocks of text, which takes a while to get used to.   And the subject matter is every bit as depressing as the movie, though in a sort of different way.  It’s one of the better things I’ve read in quite a while, though, have I mentioned depressing?

The reason I bring this up is not just to brag about still reading books occasionally and choosing challenging books (a little for that, but not enough for a post on it’s own :) ), or to recommend a book, but to point out a couple parallels between this and another work on the same subject matter of heroin addicted junkies in New York.  The musical Rent.

This is mainly because the morning after I finished reading Requiem For A Dream, I happened to have the soundtrack for Rent in the CD player in my car, and was listening to it on the way to work (irony of listening to Rent on the way to my corporate job aside for the moment).  As it so happened, I was near the end of the first disc, and some of the first lyrics were, in ultra upbeat, cheery musical theater style:

I’m Willin’
I’m Illin’
I Gotta Get My Sickness Off
Gotta Run, Gotta Ride
Gotta Gun, Gotta Hide — Gotta Go
And It’s Beginning To Snow

First I was struck by the absolute tonal dissidence of these two takes on the same subject matter.  Like a Sound of Music / Schindler’s List contrast.  (Okay, I’ve never seen Schindler’s List, but if you makes you want to die for about a week after watching it, we’re on the right track.)  Especially that song from Rent versus the chapters of pain and agony in Requiem of “trying to get one’s sickness off”.  I was a little clueless on some of the lingo and allusions in Rent as well, but Requiem expounds on it pretty well.  For example, “getting one’s sickness off” is taking another dose of heroin to stop the sickness caused by withdrawal symptoms when a junkie has gone too long between fixes.  From Requiem’s description this sickness is gut wrenchingly nasty.

After getting past the style difference, and I started to notice more and more overlap in language and slang, it started to strike me that for the huge difference in tone and style, how many plot points the two works had in common.

A sampling of what I have picked up on so far, in roughly order that I noticed them rather than any sort of theme I’m trying to develop.  Note- there are lots and lots of spoilers in here:

• Both features heroin addicts living in New York struggling with addiction.
• Both feature somewhat prominently the phone calls (and lack there of) around rather one sided parent child relationships.
• The main protagonist is a male.  He has a love interest who is also a junkie.  The female has some amount of involvement in activities bordering on or venturing well into prostitution.  The male protagonist is fairly aware of this but generally turns a blind eye to, except for the isolated moments where it particularly sets him off into a sort of festering rage.
• The main protagonist has a male friend who is also featured rather prominently, who has a generally detached/ambivalent view of his friend’s love live / involvement, but generally tries to take some amount of care of the female.  This friend tends to be slightly more detached and unemotional in general.
• The main characters have dreams/plans of starting a dining establishment which will serve as an escape from their current situation and as a long term source of financial well being.  Slight attempts are made at getting started on the establishment of this restaurant, but are generally abortive early on and the goal is more or less forgotten by the end, clouded out by drugs and love (and lack there of).
• One main character is teetering on the boarder of death at the end, and has a near death experience where he/she goes towards and then come back from a white light.  His/her exact status of life/death is somewhat unclear at the end but it is likely safe to assume he/she is not long for this world.
• A trip to a distant, southern portion of the USA is planned as part of their long term financial success, though any sort of real though or plans are entirely lacking.
• There is a brief period of excitement and optimism just before exactly half way through, which leads to a long, slow decline over the second half.
• The events take place over almost exactly the course of one full year (slightly less in Requiem)
• The ability to pay the rent is featured as a prominent driver of action.
• The ease/challenges and burden/benefits of surviving with or without one’s significant other feature very prominently.  Especially as they relate to one’s own drug addiction.
• A fair portion of the action takes place in/around abandoned and dangerous areas of New York.  Only briefly does the city seem particularly alive.  For the most part it is closer to a battle field.

There may well be others, but that struck me as a whole lot of similarities for two works that are so different on the surface.

• Boating
• A reflective Lake Todd ripples on entry
• Playing with butterflies
• F18 Cockpit
• Clouds

In the course of the last two days we’ve had someone with Pink Eye come in to work, and someone else with Strep Throat come in to work.  Both of them knew it, knew they were contagious, and came in anyway.  It took repeated pleas/orders from the Strep Throat one’s boss to get her to go home, and she still stuck around for a good hour before leaving.  Pink Eye has come in to work every day, and has not gone home at all.

Now mind you, our company gives everyone a laptop as their computer so you can work from home, or from other cities (it’s consulting), so it’s not like working from home means you’re burning you PTO / vacation hours.  You’re just working and don’t have to commute or dress up.  And yet people still keep coming into our cube farm when they’re knowingly contagious and almost refuse to leave.  Something is seriously wrong with attitudes towards work around here.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to stop by the day care and find some toddlers to sneeze on me.