March 2008 Archives

The game, courtesy of Miss Syl, was:

* Pick 15 of your favorite movies
* Go to IMDB and find a quote from each movie
* Post them on your blog for everyone to guess (no fucking googling them! I'll know!)
* Fill in the film title once it’s been guessed

Edit: Jeff MacDude, Hiromi and Darkneuro are in with lists. This is a pretty good game.

In fact I didn't get to fifteen, due to short attention span or something. Eleven will have to do.

Some of these seem easy. Some not so much.

1) "What an eccentric performance."
Monty Python and the Holy Grail - good one, Ray.

2) "Arrange food, drink, entertainment, and a sit-down orgy for forteen."
a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum - Jeff Hoover who has great taste in movies

3) "Harlock, you've either been drinking or you're suffering from severe combat fatigue."
Incredible Mister Limpet; when I was a kid, this was my favorite movie. (no one got this one - I sorta hoped jjh would know it!)

4) "Dear Buddha, please bring me a pony and a plastic rocket... "
Serenity - guessed by Bluwhls. I knew there was a Browncoat in the bunch.

5) "Do you know the meaning of love, professor?"
20,000 leagues under the Sea. A whale of a tale to tell ya lads, but no one got this one.

6) "Just try and keep it from turning into a fucking bloodbath, all right? Not like last time."
Desperado. I'm surprised no one got this; It's pretty much the best action film ever made.

7) "I eat the pussy, I eat the butt, I eat every motherfuckin' thang."
True Romance - guessed by Charlotte. I love that line.

8) "You stupid, ignorant son of a bitch, dumb bastard. Jesus Christ. I've met some dumb bastards in my time but you outdo them all. "
the SIlver Streak, one of my all-time favorite comedies. NIce job, jjh!

9) "Queen Elizabeth is a man! Prince Charles is a faggot! Winston Churchill was full of shit! Shakespeare's French!"
American Werewolf in London - Hiromi got this one!

10) "For twenty dollars I can tell you a lot of things. For thirty dollars I can tell you more. And for fifty dollars I can tell you *everything*."
Pee Wee's Big Adventure - guess by Syl, of course.

11) "Nuclear weapons, Jack. They mean nothing. Everybody's got them, nobody has the balls to use them. Am I right?"
*more quotes, same film:
Innerspace. No one got this one.

Yesterday I sailed the seven seas - or at least a couple of square miles on San Francisco Bay - on a reasonable facsimile of a realio-trulio Pirate Ship.

Ok, so it was a school field trip with my fourth-grade daughter's class. There was no rum, no pillage, precious little mayhem. But terms like avast and belay were heard without a trace of irony.

The boat in question (the hawaiian chieftain) is one of a pair of historically accurate reproduction of 18th century sailing ships run by Gray's Harbor Historical Seaport; they spend the year sailing the west coast and doing various educational and training cruises, wintering in southern CA, and spending summers someplace in washington.

I was, from the moment we boarded, green with envy. These people - mostly college students, with a few crusty old salts - work long hours, get payed little, and live full time on the ships, if in considerably more comfort than we'd have seen two hundred years ago (flush toilets, and food without so many maggots and weevils; the good things about modern technology). They do this 'cause they love the sailing, I guess, and because how else in this day can you call yourself a pirate and actually put in on your curriculum vitae?

I was all for joining up with then and there. I could hang with a year sailing; forget all this fucking high tech.

Alas, my three hour tour was just that, and I had at the end of the day to collect my truck-load of kids and return them to school. Yet I've spent the last 24 hours thinking about jibs and spars, about working aloft in the rigging, about what it'd be like to have land feel odd under my feet. Even if it's play, I wanted to go do it. Call it my version of the old run off and join the circus fantasy.

So of course I looked at the crew openings page. Because the world needs more sailors and fewer engineers, sez I.

I kind of felt like I should pull last night's posting; you know how I am. I hate whining.

Whatever.

Today, I got the dust washed off my motorcycle, and found that even though I've not ridden it in months, it started up. I pumped the tires up, made a list of the small maintenance items I need to take care of before it's ridable (new turn signal, bleed the brakes, made a chain adjustment). Tomorrow I'll see if the shop can take it; I don't have time to work on it, but the weather is friendly and I feel the need to be back on two wheels.

I never actually got riding; but I still feel some small sense of accomplish for getting it out of mothballs. I'm not sure why I quit riding nine months ago or so, but it's time to fix that.

The rest of my day got eaten by family; though we're not christians, my kids do love the easter ritual (and I always feel like I should talk about atheism whenever I celebrate the social side of religious holidays, but we'll save that for next time). This morning was all about bunnies and eggs, and the afternoon went to yard work for my mother, excavating my triumph from my garage, prepping a classic leg 'o lamb for dinner, and then a fight with a migraine headache, the product of too much stress and not enough sleep; my body saying slow the fuck down, dude.

My weekend is gone, but I do feel slightly better than last nigh; work left me alone all day, I got something personally important taken care of, and dinner was great.

I think I can survive another week or two of this; a week from now I get my lead programmer back from vacation, and if I'm lucky, this damned chip will be done by that time. If this were vacation countdown it'd be easy, I'd have my tickets in hand and my count-down til departure date. RIght now, I'm trying to look at the short count, while not really planning any particular date, just in case. Cause that's how it's been, with the sliding completion date just out ahead like a carrot on a stick (and that's "on a stick," not "and a stick"; when did people mix that term up to mean reward or punishment?)

My plan, for when I can finally cut loose? I'd like to say mayhem, but first, I need some fucking sleep.

...and then, you know, maybe a little mayhem.

There was a blog entry I started a couple of days ago, based on an over-heard conversation at work. Some co worker talking about hawaii, which led me to a sort of longing reverie about the place.

I'd sort of intended to expand that to a general reverie about tropical locations, both real places, and fanciful versions of a tropical paradise I hold in my head pretty much all the time.

Of course, I got interrupted - by work - before I could even get the thought down; and *poof* the thread was gone.

Such was my week, and my weekend.

If you've ever read Harrison Bergeron, you'll remember Vonnegut's vivid description of a device worn by those of greater-than-average intelligence, the purpose of which was to disrupt thought with random, loud noises played directly into the wearer's ear. In Vonnegut's story, the reason for this was to make everyone truly equal, handicapping anyone with any extra ability (the strong or graceful weighted down and encumbered, those with better eyesight made to wear vision-weakening goggles; those who are specially beautiful must wear some sort of distorting facial appliance).

The images are nightmarish, of course; the social commentary though, is something I found, when I read it as a young teen, to be truly eye-opening (though that's not my point, right this second).

I think of this now, because that's how I've felt these last few weeks. As if some heinous sound is being piped into my skull each and every time I begin to find focus. Each time I seem to find the beat, the path to productivity, some spark of creativity, a virtual mental ball-peen hammer crashes into my temple and wrenches e away. My step falters, I re-adjust, find focus, and address whatever new drama, trauma or emergency this particular hammer represents.

I'm trying to remember the last time I *didn't* have my work phone ring at least four a day on a weekend; I can't recall.

Tonight, after spending my day fighting both real life's fires, and a hundred little issues from work, I find I can't even sleep, though my eyes burn with fatigue. I'm unable to disengage. I've settled fights between by nine-and-fourteen-year-old daughters, tried to make progress against the eternally growing chaos that is my house, ferried children to various social engagements, shopped, and dealt with crashing file servers, users who don't tell me things are broken, but instead try to work around the problem (which, with the kind of people I support, always makes things worse). I've also had the usual pained, whining phone call from my mother, who never goes anywhere or does anything, wondering why I don't remember to call her and tell her when I might be able to come over and bring her fresh treats from WHole Foods.

My eyes burn with fatigue; yet there are ten more things I should be doing before I sleep, none of which are writing.

When I opened my text editor to begin this, it was with the intent of finishing that hawaii entry; the images are gone, though. I cannot conjure the serenity, the calm in the mind's eye that I need to feel the island breeze, to smell the rum, coconut, the warm, sea-salt-sweat smell of a woman beside me. I can describe it because I remember the description, but I can't see it when I close my eyes. All I see are tax forms I need to gather tomorrow and the stacks of paper and laundry and broken this-and-that I need to manage.

I wonder when my life stopped being full of something other than work, and lists of tasks.

I've tried three times now to finish the thought on that last line above; each time, I find I've gotten side tracked. MY mind won't stay in one place long enough to make sense of it; yet I fear closing my eyes for fear I'll lie in the dark, grinding my teeth and wondering what vital task I'm forgetting.

There's a place I need to get back to; I was almost there, a day and a half ago, for a few minutes, when I could remember the sand, sun, sea, teh girl beside me. Even if I can't be there in body, at least for a few minutes, I need my head back there, so I can remember why I do this, why I grind myself down day after day.

Ok, now we done with our once-a-year foray into irishness?

Alright then.

Happy saint paddies day from Horslips:

(Dearg Doom means Red Destroyer)

I'm getting bored with bitching about how swampped I am. And I bet you are already clicking away, thinking, oh, sure, another whine-whine-i'm-so-fucking-busy-i-can't-blog-apart-from-blogging-about-being-busy entry.

Fair enough.

Thing is, I keep making the mistake of thinking - and saying, in some cases - it'll be better after this week. Which it isn't. I was pretty damn sure after my LA trip last month that things would start to quiet down; the project we're working on is just about to finish (no, it won't get announced at some upcoming show, we're back to working on system internals, nothing so splashy as last time). I figured the night-and-weekend, no-time-to-think-or-talk thing was about over, that I'd have time to take a lunch break or plau hookey for an afternoon any day now.

Of course I was wrong; while the project is closing out soon, this has been one of those moving target games, where 'about three weeks' is always out about three weeks from any value of now. And we've got two more projects spinning up in the next week or so ("oh just little ones, they'll be quick," the teams are saying. Sure. Riiiiight.)

And of course, I just got pulled into some planning on longer terms stuff; projects I am VERY INTERESTED IN, yet don't have bandwidth to think about yet. I'm so busy bailing I can't even visualize building a new boat.

Add to that my boss leaving my team (which means I'm having to step in and catch all the balls and clubs and rings and chainsaws he's been juggling, in effect picking up a new job on top of my old one), and my main co-worker leaving for the rest of the month for a (well deserved) trip home to ethiopia, and I'm looking at a solid month of saying i need a fucking vacation. Which I don't have time or dough for, at least not out as far on the horizon as I can see from here.

My head will now explode. Stand Back.

The one thing I've managed to do is some cooking; even with working most of the weekend, paying my bills, tending my mother, and driving kids around to various play dates and teen birthday parties, I managed to make both a dinner of grilled, mint-and-yogurt marinated lamb with artichokes saturday, and tonight, what turned out to be the best tomato soup I've ever had (courtesy of a tyler florence recipe).

I've said it before; when everything seems like it's comin' down around your ears, try cooking something. If you don't have time for therapeutic rough sex, smoke and fire and knives is the next best thing (though, you know, sex that includes smoke, fire and knives? That sounds pretty damn good.)

Now I've distracted myself. I was going to post recipes, one for roasted tomato soup with bacon, and another marinated lamb. But instead I'm imagining the sort of thing I need a lot more brainpower to describe. That, possibly, will be my next entry. But I'm finding writing erotica isn't so easy when one's fighting several weeks of sleep deficit.

I meant to post this two weeks ago and as usual, the sheer load of stuff I need to do got in the way. I'm in the final two weeks of getting a project out and... well, nevermind, I don't wanna talk about work. Let's just say, busy with a side of busy.

Anyway, I'm here to talk about music.

My current big band obssion is The Bad Plus.

I blogged about them not long ago; but since then I've seen them play live since.

I discovered this band sort of by accident; my friend Chris (also known as Papa by my kids, Christo von Paisley back in the Jailbait Babysitters days), and as Papa Christo by a whole lot of our friends, mixing the two nicknames together) handed me These are the Vistas one day a couple years ago, saying, you like jazz, you should check these guys out. , and I liked them instantly.

If you have not listened to them, it's impossible to convey in one or two song samples, and it's difficult to describe. They are a basic jazz piano trio (piano, stand up bass, drums). However, they have a way of playing with a rock sensibility, even while very much being a jazz group. They are not really fusion, certainly not what I think of as fusion (chick corea, john mclaughlin, herbie hancock, joe zawinul). Sonically, they're pure jazz. Yet they manage to feel more purely like a fusion than any of those bands did, at least back in fusion's heyday in the 70s and 80s; no electric instruments, no funk bass, no distortion, but instead the rock coming from driving beats and a rock-infused melodic sense.

They play covers from Bacharach to Rush, Tears for Fears to Queen, Interpol to Black Sabbath. Yet it's their originals I find most inspired (and you'll find two examples below); these guys are all three accomplished composers, with distinctly different styles.

A few months ago, when I saw Richard Thompson play in Saratoga, CA, I noticed The Bad Plus listed on a bill of upcoming acts. So I was watching for tickets to go on sale.

When then did, I was nearly first in virtual line, snapping up front row seats in what has to be one of the south bay's best small venues, the Villa Montalvo carriage house theater.

I wasn't sure who would be going wth me, but I picked up three tickets; Chris, I was sure, would want one, but Kenny or one of my other jazz musician friends would be interested; a good seat is almost always easy to give away.

Cut to a month ago, when I posted this entry; my nine-year-old daughter Ruby, who'd always responded stringly to jazz (from the time she was an infant, if I had jazz on, she calm down and listen), developed an un-expected love for The Bad Plus.

She impressed the hell out of me. TBP are, to say the least, somewhat challenging; they play weird songs, weird time signatures, bizarre improvisational sections. They're not user friendly jazz. Ruby got them, and loved them. She kept seeking them out in my iPod, asked me to load them onto hers. When I told her I had an extra ticket, she enthusiastically said yet, I want to go!

When the night of the show came, Ruby was excited to the point of speechlessness. Se's funny like that, her sister gets twitchy and talks non-stop when excited, chatters so fast you wonder when she has time to breathe. Not Ruby; she goes near-catatonic. Like so much sensory input sends her into a fugue state. That's how they were when we were seeing Wicked; Olivia vibrating and ruby absolutely still, wide-eyed and stone faced. Both in a state of rapture, but with polar opposite appearances.