Though this site hasn’t officially moved yet, you’ll find fresher content at http://www.foldedspace.org/ (new RSS feed).
The main entries will continue to be posted here, but all other content — including the flotch — is being routed to the new address. Note that the layout there is not final; I’m just using an out-of-the-box template.
The gang got together in Stayton yesterday for Craig and Lisa‘s annual harvest fest. There was a lot of good food. Too much good food.
After the sun set, the stars came out. Stayton is fairly rural, and so even the dimmest stars are visible. Jeremy, Hank, and I spent a few minutes down by the pasture, listening to the Beavers, picking out constellations from the sky. I used to be good at this, but I’m getting rusty.
“Look at that, Harrison,” Jeremy said, sweeping his arm in an arc over our heads. “You see that white, milky glow? That’s our galaxy. We’re just one planet and one star on the edge of a bunch of other stars.”
Harrison is of an age that this can almost impress him. He had lots of questions about galaxies. I remembered that Nick and I found this video last week, and I promised to post it so that Hank could learn more:
Astronomy is fascinating. Nothing makes me feel smaller or more insignificant. And yet nothing makes me feel more awed by the wonders of life.
Barbers are natural-born storytellers. I love getting my hair cut because it’s guaranteed entertainment. Today my barber told me all about The Nam.
The conversation began as a discussion of teaching foreign languages in high school. The other barbers, and one of the customers, think it’s a shame that foreign languages aren’t required anymore. I commented that even when I was in school, they weren’t required, and that their presence has faded even more in the last twenty years.
This prompted my barber to mention that all he knows are some phrases in Vietnamese. (Warning: foul language ahead.)
“But my Vietnamese isn’t very good,” he said. “Once over there I found this gook on the side of the road and I pointed my gun at him” — my barber leveled his clippers at his own reflection in the mirror — “and I told him in Vietnamese to put his hands up. But he didn’t understand me. I said it again, and he still didn’t understand me, so I started shouting at him in English. I was scared. ‘You goddman flathead, if you don’t put your fucking hands up, I’m going to kill you.’ Well, apparently the gook’s English was better than my Vietnamese because he flipped me off and shouted back, ‘You fucking pig. I don’t do nothing. You fucking Marine.’ And I would’ve shot him, too.”
“They hated us over there, and they had every right. We Marines were trained to shoot anything that moved. And we did. We didn’t have a choice. I mean I went over there and told myself I wasn’t killing nothing, but all it takes is for those first few bullets to come flying at you, and you change your mind real quick. You kill your first man and it makes you sick. You throw up.” — here he pretended he was vomiting — “You feel terrible. But then after you kill a few more, you get used to it, you even get to kind of like it. You feel powerful. It’s a terrible thing, but it happens. That’s war. It’s how it works. You kill or be killed.”
“The thing is, though, it really fucks you up. When I became a civilian again — this would have been 1970 — I was really messed up. I went to a shrink at the VA and I told him that I was having dreams. I said, ‘Doc, I dream that a bunch of gooks are chasing me. They chase me to the edge of a cliff, and I don’t want them to kill me, so I jump off and fall to the rocks below. But I don’t break up. I bounce. I bounce off the rocks back up to the cliff where the gooks are and I flip them off. And then I jump again, but I bounce right back up. What’s wrong, Doc? I have this dream all the time.’ The shrink just laughed at me. ‘Son, you know what the matter is? You think you’re Superman.’ And you know what? He was right. I did think I was Superman. I had an attitude. I was always getting in fights. I loved it. I lived to mix it up. A good Friday night ended up with a fight at a bar.”
“This one time, when I first set up shop on my own, I pissed some guy off, and he got out of his chair and he was bouncing around with his fists in the air — you know, like in the cartoons — and he said, ‘I’m going to kick your ass.’ ‘We’re going to be here a while then,’ I said. And that just made him madder. ‘I’m going to hit you in the face,’ he said. ‘You’d better do it,’ I told him. ‘You look pretty goddamn silly bouncing around like that. You look like a kid.’ He never did hit me, which was lucky for him.”
“You get some crazy customers sometimes. In barber college, we used to give free cuts to the drunks. I remember one time this drunk came in and I took him in back to give him a shampoo. I’d never given a shampoo before — this was only my second or third haircut — but how hard could it be? I took him in back and lathered him up and began to give him a shampoo but his hair started falling out in clumps. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong with your hair?’ The drunk freaked out. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he said, and he jumped up from the chair — soap still in his hair — and he ran out of the barber college. We had to chase him down and apologize. He came back, but he wouldn’t let me touch his hair.”
I gave the man a $3 tip on a $12 haircut.
I need your help.
Sometime in the future — though not for several months at the outside — I’m going to start a weblog about early American popular music. (Surprised? You shouldn’t be.)
I know that I want to call this weblog Happy Feet. It’s the name of an old song (mp3), and describes perfectly the vibe I’m hoping to achieve. However, all of the domains with any variation on “happy feet” or “happy foot” are already taken. What am I to do? Come to you for help!
Assuming that I still want to call this hypothetical site Happy Feet, then what domain ought I to register. Some possibilities include:
Please, devoted readers, help me to choose the best option. No idea is too dumb! Let me hear your toughts! (But not the “oh good lord why is J.D. starting another weblog?” thoughts.)
The web is an interesting place, and the blogosphere more interesting still. It’s become clear that there’s space for millions of voices to write on millions of topics. But only a few weblogs rise to the top.
How, then, can a person be sure that a weblog will obtain popularity? The short answer is: “We can’t.” But I think that just as domain-name speculators have been able to make their trade profitable, it’s becoming possible to make money from blog speculation.
I kid you not.
When Nintendo announced that its next-generation gaming system would be dubbed Wii, it took me a few hours to realize the obvious: Wii Blog was the perfect name for a Wii-themed news site. By the time I’d figured this out, the domains were gone. One is home to a lame-ish blog (and others are dead or mere placeholders), but it didn’t have to be that way. With a little style and panache and a lot of content, the Wii Blog could have been a hub for Wii enthusiasts, and a huge money-making proposition.
Blog opportunities aren’t limited to the realm of consumer electronics. I was reading an article today about Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Obama is a rising star in the Democratic party. (Perhaps the rising star, the One Great Hope.) He has cross-party appeal, bridging all sorts of gaps. He’s black. He’s religious. He’s an excellent orator. He knocks ’em dead wherever he goes. He’s widely expected to be a viable Presidential candidate inside a decade. “Why not an Obama blog?” I thought, and before the thought had even finished forming, I was on my way to the computer to set one up. But, alas, the idea has occurred to others already.
What other sorts of blog topics could generate traffic and cash? It doesn’t take much of an imagination sometimes to make a prediction. How about a blog about the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign? Start it now, add quality content, and in two years you have a search-engine-friendly popular blog with huge traffic. And huge revenue.
Think making money from blogs is impossible? It’s not. If I can make several hundred dollars a month (or more) from my loose collection of blogs, how much could a person who pursued this seriously make? A savvy techie could make a fortune in passive income.
In the future, I believe we’ll see more blog speculation as people create sites devoted to the Next Big Thing.
As some of you have already noticed, I’ve begun working on a foldedspace.org remodel at the root of this site. Yes, it’s true: I’m going to switch this blog from Moveable Type to WordPress. I’m also going to move its location again. With any sort of luck, this will be the last major overhaul for a long time.
Listen people, this is easy: you do not always use the word “I” when speaking of yourself and another person.
I’m going to be called a grammar Nazi for devoting an entire weblog entry to this, but it’s driving me crazy. Over the past week I’ve seen this error a dozen times, and from smart people who should know better.
What am I talking about? We’re taught from a young age that it’s polite to say:
Jane and I are going to the store.
That’s well and good for the nominative case, when you and Jane are the subjects of the sentence. But it does not work if you and Jane are the objects of the sentence. This sentence is an abomination:
The man gave ice cream to Jane and I.
This is WRONG, and it hurts my brain. It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard. I’m serious. It drives me insane. Would you say this?
The man gave ice cream to I.
Of course not! Politeness does not take precedence over grammar. The proper sentence in this case is:
The man gave ice cream to me.
And if you’re talking about yourself and another person, then the proper form is:
The man gave ice cream to Jane and me.
I know that sounds wrong, but it’s better than “Jane and I”. Far better. And if you really want it to sound better, then ditch your notions of the polite and say:
The man gave ice cream to me and Jane.
However, the real answer to your dilemma is to use the handy clear and concise first-person plural.
The man gave ice cream to us.
Isn’t that nice?
Are you confused? Here’s an easy way to tell whether you should use “Jane and I” or “Jane and me”. Ask yourself: if this sentence were only about me, which would I use, “I” or “me”? Use the same pronoun when talking about yourself and another person. Seriously. That’s the rule.
You make Kris and I weep when you do this.
Tom, the guy who lives next door, tells me that the rainy season starts October 15th. He’s old, and has lived in this area for longer than I’ve been alive, so I should believe him. All the same, I spent some time rummaging around the National Weather Service web site to see if he’s correct. He is, mostly: the rains do start in the middle of October, though there’s no one set day.
I also found that the warm days (by which I mean above 27 centigrade) generally end around the first of September. We’ve had a bit of an extension this year, but it looks like that’s going to come to an end. It’s 27 outside the office right now, but the highs for the next week are only expected to reach about 20 or 21. My kind of temperatures.
“Summer’s ending,” I told Kris when I first saw the forecast, with its stark change from sunny and warm on Tuesday to cool and damp on Wednesday.
“Shut up,” she told me. It’s been a long, dry summer (and our plants are suffering for it — I seem to have lost a blueberry!), but she’s not ready for it to end. To tell the truth, I don’t know if I am, either.
Don’t get me wrong — I love autumn. It’s my favorite season. But this has been a nice summer. I could wish for it to last a while longer. My cousin Bob just built us a wonderful new picnic table and delivered it on Sunday night. Couldn’t I be granted a few more warm days to enjoy it?
Too, there’s the fact that we’re beginning to believe that my Depression is seasonal. We had a couple of grey days a few weeks ago, and wouldn’t you know it? I fell into a deep funk. I’ve never given much credence to Seasonal Affective Disorder (also), but I’m going to pay close attention to my mood levels over the next couple of months. There may be something real here. (Tiffany was the first one to point out that my mood seemed to be influenced by the weather.)
I took a walk this afternoon, and enjoyed the sun. I had too. It may be the last I see of it for six months.
I made some changes to this site’s RSS feed the other day. Could somebody who reads foldedspace via RSS please leave a comment (or e-mail me) so that I can verify things still work? Just a ping is fine.
Here’s an entry I’m able to post to three different weblogs! You gotta love that…
Rhonda called this morning. “There’s a garage sale near me where a guy is selling old comic books. They’re from the seventies. You might want to come take a look.”
I did want to take a look, though I knew it was dangerous business. One key to managing your money is to avoid temptation. It’s foolish to purposefully put yourself into a position where you’re likely to spend.
And yet I drove to the garage sale to look at the comics books.
I’ve collected comics since I was a boy. I used to collect the actual magazines, buying them at grocery stores and bookshops. I grew out of them in high school, and in 1989 I sold my entire collection for $100 to a comic book store near my university. I needed the money to take a girlfriend on an expensive date. (The collection I sold included many fine runs, including all of Miller Daredevil, most of the “new” X-Men, all of Marvel Star Wars — basically all the cool stuff from the late seventies and early eighties when I had been actively collecting.)
Most garage sale comics are woefully overpriced. People ask $5 for a common-as-dirt mid-nineties Batman, for example. Nobody’s going to pay that. But the garage sale I drove to today was different. The seller had two boxes of mid-seventies Marvel comics, all of which were priced at about $2 an issue.
He had Amazing Spider-Man from about 115-145. He had Fantastic Four from about 130-160. He had Incredible Hulk from about 180-200. He had various issues of Avengers, X-Men, Captain America, and Daredevil. There was a lot of great stuff here, and two years ago I would have offered $100 for as much as the seller would let me take.
I didn’t do that today. Today I leafed through both boxes, thanked the man, and left. Why? Two reasons:
Would I have liked to have these comics? Absolutely. They would be great fun to read, especially since most won’t be collected in reprint volumes for another five or ten years, if ever. But I can’t keep up with the comics I buy currently. I’m thinking of cutting back to collecting only comic strip compilations. And there are other things I’d like buy with that money. (MacBook Pro, anyone?)
In the end, I only spent a few dollars in gas to drive to the sale and back: a victory for the new frugal J.D.
Ah, YouTube, how I love you. Lonelygirl15. Storm Large. Stephen Colbert. That dude who does all the movie re-enactments. (Woohoo! He did The Big Lebowski — NSFW.) And, what do you know, a whole collection of intros from my favorite science fiction shows. It’s like a sort of geek-gasm.
For Dave and my brother Jeff (with whom I used to watch this show), “a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist”.
Man, I love that theme music. I also like the theme music to Buck Rogers:
Whatever happened to Gil Gerard anyhow?
Yes, my brothers and I loved science fiction shows. We didn’t have a TV when we were young, so we had to catch peeks of The Six-Million Dollar Man when we were visiting friends on Sunday night.
We didn’t get to watch The Bionic Woman when it originally aired, either, but eventually KPTV in Portland would re-run it in the late mornings during a period when we did have a television. Staying home sick became a treat!
Jamie Sommers wasn’t the only superwoman we liked. There was also Wonder Woman.
The Wonder Woman intro changed later in the show’s run:
Does anyone else remember this Indiana Jones knockoff? I think it aired on Friday nights.
Saturday morning cartoons were always a treat for us, but I was especially drawn to the live-action shows, shows like Space Academy:
and Ark II:
Who can forget the mighty Isis? (Isis, Isis, Isis)
Which, as I recall, aired in tandem with SHAZAM! (in something like “the power hour”).
I think The Greatest American Hero borrowed its flying effects from SHAZAM!. I watched every episode of this, but it never lived up to my hopes.
We worshipped Battlestar Galactica:
It helped that Mormon themes were prominent in the show’s mythology. We could relate. Now I love the new incarnation of Battlestar. I think that the first season’s opening sequence is the best-ever for a sci-fi show. (I really wish they hadn’t done away with the 20 seconds of preview clips for the season two intro.)
Another childhood favorite has been remade recently. I started watching Doctor Who during the Tom Baker years.
I love the new series. It gave me chills the first time I heard the theme redone.
There have been some other good recent sci-fi shows. What would the mid-nineties have been without The X-Files?
Farscape was fascinating, but I could never really get into it.
Firefly was vastly overrated. I know you all love it. I don’t. (And Serenity wasn’t very good, either.)
Babylon 5 is simultaneously over-rated (by fans) and under-rated (by everyone else). It’s not nearly as good as the zealots proclaim, but it’s worth watching. Especially the second season. Each season had its own title sequence. I’m not going to post them all, but here’s the title sequence for season one:
And the title sequence for season two:
(You can get a feel for some the awful writing with “the name of the place is Babylon 5” at the end of the voiceover.)
Here’s a show that my wife and I loved, but which didn’t last:
In high school, I loved Max Headroom, but now it seems oh-so-very-mid-eighties.
There are a lot of sci-fi shows I haven’t seen, such as:
I used to watch these two when KECH 22 debuted in Portland:
Here’s a show that’s not nearly as good as I remember it being:
And, of course, here’s the classic, the one that started it all for me. My childhood was devoted to Star Trek, the original series. KPTV showed reruns every Sunday at 4pm throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It would also frequently run the show on weekeday evenings before prime-time. I loved it.
During the early nineties I became obsessed with the first spinoff. I posted to USENET about the show. I kept detailed logs of every episode. I even audiotaped it. (I can’t believe this is the best quality version available on YouTube.)
Deep Space Nine was okay, though it lacked some of the spark of the first two series.
However, Voyager sucked. It had a great intro and gorgeous theme music, but the rest of the show was lousy.
It wasn’t as lousy as Enterprise, though, which had the worst theme song ever for a sci-fi series.
My parents once took me to a movie theater in Portland specifically because the Star Trek blooper reels were playing. They’re not as funny as I remember.
What is funny (and Star Trek-related) is the recent William Shatner celebrity roast. You can find all of the segments on YouTube, but the best is Shatner’s response (which is very NSFW).
And finally, though it wasn’t a television show, here’s a clip from one of my favorite early-eighties sci-fi films. I own this soundtrack on record, tape, and CD. I spent $50 to order the DVD (which is out of print) from eBay. Yes, I know I’m crazy.
Stupid, but I love it.
Kris and I grow a vegetable garden every year, but some summers are more productive than others. This summer has been the most productive that I can recall.
We were swimming in berries from the end of May until the end of July. We had so many berries that we eventually gave up. Can you imagine? Not eating fresh berries that sit there, ready to be picked? We didn’t let them all go to waste, of course. Kris canned some of them. I’ve been enjoying toast and freezer jam every morning since we returned from San Francisco.
We were picking snow peas for just as long, eating them fresh off the vine. Eventually we gave up on those, too, and just let them wither. (We planted our fall pea crop a couple weeks ago; I have little one-inch sprouts.)
Kris and Craig masterminded a tomato-growing extravaganza: they ordered seeds together, and each are testing certain varieties. Kris has eight plants (plus just as many volunteers scattered throughout the yard), and she’s been harvesting the fruit like mad. She’s made tomato soup, tomato sauce, marinara sauce, and, of course, many batches of the Best Salsa Ever. Her tomato map hangs from the fridge, and she’s circled her favorite varieties (Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Yellow Pear, Bloody Butcher, Dr. Wyche’s Yellow, and maybe Caspian Pink).
Our neighbors have given us apples and pears, and soon we’ll pick grapes from across the street. From our garden, we’ve picked cucumbers and green beans and zucchini and corn.
It’s a veritable cornucopia.
What to do with all this food? (Especially since I’m allergic to many vegetables?) Can it, of course.
Kris has been canning like crazy — sometimes with Tiffany’s help — and last night, she set out the fruits of her labor:
Here’s a list of everything that she’s canned:
Later she realized that she’d forgotten a box of jars downstairs. “And don’t forget that we’ve given some away, too,” she told me. She’s also making some (gnat-infested) berry liqueur, which is fermenting on a shelf in the library.
Of course, all of this canning is nothing compared to some people…
