Rick Keir's Journal

11:21pm: old movies
Lucy and I have been on an old movie kick lately, watching the Marx Brothers, Peter Sellers (A Shot in the Dark, The Mouse That Roared), and now onto Audrey Hepburn. I'd never seen Funny Face, nor even really known what it was about. It has Audrey Hepburn as a bookstore clerk turned model, working with a photographer called "Dick Avery", using real photos taken by Richard Avedon and Bill Avery. However, Fred Astaire's "Dick Avery" is definitely not a Russian/Jewish New Yorker: he's Fred Astaire. Too bad, as Avedon is himself fascinating.

Damn, Audrey Hepburn dominates the screen. I've only ever seen her in a couple of televised versions (i.e., commercials!) of Sabrina, and when I was a teenager, in Breakfast at Tiffany's, and My Fair Lady as a small child. Those didn't leave any impression, probably because I wasn't old enough to appreciate them. I had no idea ... well, just insert a Keanu Reeves "whoa" here. She's also does a great dance number, which was bastardized with an AC/DC soundtrack for a Gap commercial a few years ago. To quote Opus from Bloom County, "Half Naked Exploding Porpoises!"

The movie's also got Kay Thompson, who wrote the Eloise books, as a silly cariacture of a fashion editor, the kind who decides on a whim that women everywhere will wear pink:

Red is dead, blue is through,
Green's obscene, brown's taboo.
And there is not the slightest excuse for plum or puce
—or chartreuse.

Which left me humming "Pretty in Pink", by the Psychedelic Furs, which is emphatically NOT about fashion.

11:04pm: quick shoulder and travel update
saw the orthopedist on Thursday. The humerus is definitely healing properly, no surgery will be needed. Physical therapy started.

Still taking pain meds - had to go back up after work trip to Iowa City with co-workers this week. Long car rides, hotel beds, and sitting around a conference table day not conducive to keeping pain under control.

On the plus side, really enjoyed spending time with peers. It's always good to meet with others who do the same thing you do, which usually means travel, as we don't run to a lot of redundancy in job duties around here.

Also on the plus side, Iowa City was very pretty: felt like it had gotten as big as a downtown can before they start knocking down the nice stuff and building modern glass and steel atrocities, and then stopped growing.

10:59pm: I love my granola eating, Birkenstock wearing town
I was walking in my neighborhood when I saw a woman pull her car up by a house, get out, and pick up two big bags of leaves and some moldy pumpkins that had been left out for the city's leaf collection.

My neighborhood: where even your compost gets trash picked.

9:48am: Armistice Day
"Some of you young men think that war is all glamour and glory,
but let me tell you, boys, it is all hell."

-General William Tecumseh Sherman

6:01pm: Zombie Library Terminal
The Sequoya branch of the Madison Public Library has self checkout terminals. They offer English and Spanish directions. Lately, theyve offered other choices, such as "Pirate" one day, "Pig Latin" another (anScay ourWay ookBay owNay). Saturday, they had "Zombie", so no matter what you did, the voice said 'BRAINNNNZZZZZ".

Appropriately, they changed the usual picture of "How to Scan" with one featuring "Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice And Zombies".

5:58pm: Life notes
Arm slowly getting better, 5 more weeks in a sling. God bless pain killers. I am down to half the original dosage. My big worry now is that, as my arm hurts less, I'll be tempted to use it more, which will interfere with the bone healing.

I was too tired/full of painkillers to deal with Trick and Treaters so I slept thru that on Saturday. Lucy and I had a mostly quiet birthday weekend. I remain astonished at my friends who are on chronic pain meds, as I am not particularly injured or in pain.

However, last night our neighbors Kathy and Gary did have us over for a combined birthday dinner, with their two youngest kids. Another neighbor, Michelle, came over with her daughter and daughter's friends, plus a birthday cake and some ice cream. Everyone sang Happy Birthday to Lucy and me. That was about right - something pleasant but not a full blown party.

Lucy and I exchanged various gifts: I'm reading John Keegan's new book on the Civil War that she gave me, while she's flipping back and forth between two new cookbooks.

I've gotten better at typing with MacSpeech Dictate (it works surprisingly well, PROVIDED you have version 1.5.5; I've read many bad reviews of the earlier version).

Quick iPhone tip: there are many different iPhone camera apps, most of them combining a way to trigger the iPhone's camera with some kind of art filter (fisheye, vignette, wild colors, etc.). I rearranged my iPhone's app screens so that there is one camera application on EACH page of apps, always in the upper right hand corner. That way, I can get to my camera quickly no matter what "page" I'm on.

3:19pm: kids say ...
last night I was talking to my sister. She asked her son "Do you want to talk to Uncle Rick?"

He did, babbling in that way kids do where you can neither understand the words or the context. He said goodbye, and she got back on the phone, when suddenly, frantically, he thought of one more thing to say.

he giggled, and then very clearly said "STUPID HEAD!" and started laughing.

I was laughing, too, though my sister was of course stuck in trying to reinforce good behavior in the small ones.

While I was at the clinic on Wednesday, in between X-rays, I read Michael Lewis's Home Game (excerpt can be found at http://www.cookiemag.com/entertainment/2009/05/home-game-excerpt), which is a very funny book about his kids, and just the sort of thing you want to read when you're waiting for the opium derivatives to kick in and make your shoulder stop hurting. It opens with a hilarious story about his kids and things you shouldn't say, which I won't spoil for you: go to a bookstore and read the intro, and if you like it, buy the book.

7:32pm: Easier than telling friends one on one .... shoulder injury
While dashing across the street this afternoon I tripped and came down hard on my right shoulder. I spent the rest of the afternoon at GHC, where they sent the X-ray image over the network to a radiologist at UW (and how cool is that, this is something I saw at Internet2 some years ago, and now it’s running in my local HMO!)

Awesome tech aside, however, the radiologist wanted more X-rays because they found a small crack. He or she finally decided I could wait overnight to be seen. So the GHC guy put me on pain meds and into a sling, and are sending me to the UW Ortho clinic tomorrow. More details after I see the docs.

This is not horrible, as long as I'm on pain meds (1/2 hour to next pill and the old one is still working, hurray), but sleeping will be a pain, driving is out for now, and I am no longer a touch typist.

I’m lucky to have both good insurance and an excellent HMO. Many people in America have neither. Support the public option, Medicare-E (for Everyone).

1:57pm: Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.

Or, if you're an IT guy, to know that you've just given your second presentation for your Fall awareness series, and that LCD projectors, multiple adapter cords, and blown projector bulbs are in your past, at least for a while.

In other news, it turns out that a Google Image search on the seemingly innocent term "old professor" will turn up some extremely NSFW images, even on the first page.

1:54pm: Repeating myself?
An excuse that my friend crazysoph suggested after I was repeating something I'd already told her.

I'm not repeating myself.

It's redundant parallel information streaming, with error correction.

3:46pm: Overheard
I gave a lunchtime brownbag today, and then grabbed lunch over at the Rathskeller.

The guy at the next table was telling his older companion about web site optimization and making money with "pay per click" schemes.

The older guy said "Paper clips? How do you make money with paper clips?"

12:56pm: First Date Memories
This weekend, we were looking at Arcadia Publishing's book of old postcards depicting Joliet, my hometown (and, btw, I love Arcadia's books, which are basically niche local history books that survive on the long tail of marketing).

One of the postcards showed the Rialto Theater, a 1920s era "Palace for the People", and Mom remembered walking by the hole as it was being built (my own memories from my teen years was the long campaign to save it from the wrecker's ball). She pointed to a building just to the left of the theater and told me that her first date, back in 1939, with Dad was "2 lines of bowling in this building, a movie next door at the Rialto, and a chocolate malt at the ice cream shop." The movie she saw was W. C. Fields, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man. As I told my cousin Bob the film buff, there can't be many people left who saw that in the theater on a first date!

She was, uncharacteristically, nervous, worried that Dad wasn't serious about the date because, as she told her mother, "Who goes out for a first date on Monday night?" It turned out that Dad worked weekends, but she didn't know that. She was also worried about what to do if he wanted to get something to eat afterwards, and her mother told her to suggest a chocolate soda or a malt. She's not sure why, in retrospect, except that maybe her mother figured it would be cheap in case Dad was low on cash.

On a later date, she and Dad stopped by a drugstore and bought magazines. Dad's sister Gina drove past them and was astonished to see them sitting in a car, both reading, which didn't seem like much of a date to her.

7:13pm: Alfred Hitchcock warned me there'd be days like this
Another grabshot, but behind a cut because I don't want to make this a photoblog. ( attack of the bird )

This was down on the terrace a week or so ago, when Lucy and I hung out watching the sunset and the sailboats, and I practiced following this gull with my telephoto and keeping it in focus, which is tricky: lose your focus point for a moment and the continuous autofocus starts trying to bring the blue sky into focus instead, which doesn't work.

5:46pm: Bang a gong
Just a "grab shot", where I saw something happening and caught it before it stopped happening. In a lot of ways, that's my favorite way to get pictures, because it leaves me involved in the world and observant.

A podcast I listen to has the tagline "Don't just take pictures...make pictures", but I always want to tell the announcer: No, no, no! Making pictures is boring ... it's taking them that is the challenge. Okay, that's probably not quite what he means by "making" pictures, but it really is a part of photography I find non-intuitive.

12:18pm: Today's dilemna

"I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat," Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person’s language, maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them but more likely (he thinks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an uncontrollable urge to be a prick.

-- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

12:22pm: quick notes
Movies: fuzzygabby recommended the Canadian comedy Slings and Arrows to me last year. Lucy and I just got around to watching it recently. It's a hoot! It's a backstage look at a theater company and their associated Shakespeare festival. The director is Geoffrey, who may be haunted by the ghost of his predecessor, Oliver ... or who just may be nuts.

Geoffrey: "I'm not superstitious."
Oliver: "You're collaborating with a ghost...wake up and smell the coffin!"

An extra pleasure comes from the many scenes where we get to see the director and actors working thru a specific Shakespeare scene, talking about motivation and how to approach it.

Family: A few weeks ago, one of my cousins came down from Chicago to take Mom out to a restaurant. It turned out to be an Italian place, located in a bowling alley, with a guy who played accordian and who came to our table and sang "Baby Face" to mom. I feel so totally midwestern, now.

Work: New hire yesterday, from private industry, in the office next to mine. She asked me and her new boss about the dress code. I looked at him and said "Do you laugh or do I?" Then I pointed to my Hawaiian shirt and his loud print shirt, and said "Easy." He added "If you wear a suit, everyone thinks you're interviewing for a new job." It's often a shock to people to come to a University. The stuff about the way we dress is an old joke, but the openness extends to our general approach to life: many a new hire has mentioned, after a while, the shock of how open and generous everyone is with knowledge. Our culture was part of someone's Ph.D. project on knowledge management in organizations a few years ago, and we were the polar opposite from the "knowledge is power" approach, where your co-workers won't help, because that might weaken them.

Music: I've been listening obsessively to Snakefarm's Songs from my Funeral , a collection of traditional American ballads (Frankie and Johnny, John Henry, Streets of Laredo, St. James Infirmary, etc.) done in "Trip-Hop" style. The curious can hear "St. James" on a Coverville show, which is where I first heard them.

Politics: I'm wondering why the people who are organizing groups to show up at public meetings on health care, threaten politicians, and shout down the speakers aren't being tasered, pepper sprayed, and night sticked. Isn't that terrorism? I guess It's Okay If You Are A Republican.

12:11pm: Local (Orange) color
Of some interest to the current and former Madisonians on my Friends List

Via http://www.madison.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=81124:

The Library Mall flute player known as "Orange Guy" is now the subject of a Fark thread
at http://www.fark.com/cgi/comments.pl?IDLink=4518073

12:07pm: links in a chain
Once again, I was reminded of the links we all have into the past. This weekend, Mom and I were watching the old BBC production of "The Nine Tailors", a murder mystery set in 1934. A squarish, cloth topped car drove by on a country rode, and Mom mentioned "that looks like your father's first car." Indeed, Dad's first car was a '29 Chevy.

His last car was a '98 Cadillac (it's the car I drive now).

1:45pm: Dress Code
I've been meaning to note this for a while. Every time I go over to meet with a colleague in the next wing, I walk past a guy who is sitting in his office, wearing a leather tricorn hat. Morning or afternoon, winter or summer, he's a pirate.

Aarrgh.

5:04pm: Encounter on the Terrace
Monday night I was down shooting photos on the Terrace: storm clouds were passing thru and the temperature and humidity had dropped back to comfortable after a hot sticky pair of weeks. Two women were walking along the lakefront holding hands, and I automatically moved over to give them room to pass: I have a subconscious expectation that same sex, hand holding couples are probably at least a little bit worried about bashing when they see a straight guy, and I like to give them room. But the two women came right up to me and asked me a few questions, and it wasn't till after they moved on that I realized that not only were they a same sex couple but they were a black and white couple as well.

So, hey, progress: when I was growing up there were states where the mere matter of non-whiteness would have been enough to prevent their marriage, and now that's gone, while there are a growing number of states where their gender is no longer a bar to marriage as well.

Vaguely related: A while back, I read Bringing Home the Birkin, about a man who got into the business of reselling Hermés products on eBay, and eventually learned how to work the system at Hermés to actually get his hands on Birkin handbags. The Birkin starts at $7,500 for the basic model and goes up after that, and the reason it sells for that much is that, unless you're a celebrity like former Spice GIrl Victoria Beckham, you can't get one. No, not even if you have the money, because the only reason people drop that kind of cash on a bag is because it's exclusive. It's an amusing book but not a classic.

What struck me was that this is the first autobiographical book I have read where the author is a gay man, and there is no mention of problems related ot his being gay. He has a loving relationship with his parents and his siblings. He meets the right man and brings him home, and has no more than normal jitters about meeting his beloved's family. AIDS gets exactly one mention, in passing.

Why this matters to me: In a year when there's a lot of suck to go around, it's good to have a few more scraps of evidence that the world is getting more civilized, in line with my favorite Violet Blue quote about bigots and "San Francisco values": They're the dinosaurs, and we're the meteor..

4:49pm: Book notes
I've been re-reading the Laurie King novels about Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell. See the link for background if you

There's a nice and unexpected sequence of her Mary Russell stories The Game (India, 1924), Locked Rooms (San Francisco, 1924), capped by one of her Kate Martinelli novels, The Art of Detection (San Francisco, 2008), which concerns a manuscript recounting a visit to San Francisco in 1924 by Sherlock Holmes. I'd not read any of the Kate Martinelli stories, which seem darker than her "English cozy" stories, but this got me hooked on Martinelli, her partner and her friends as interesting people, set in a familiar town.

I find it amusing that Mary Russell is also on Twitter and on MySpace.

Unrelated but can't get it out of my head:

He shoots his cuffs, now he's headed downtown
Picks up one life, puts another one down
And his body hums and the music's playing
Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance

7:23pm: love song to a local
I've stopped down at Zuzu, for a Gyros plate and split pea soup. A man with a big dog is having a beer outside; three runners occupy another outside table; two kids are playing with the train set; a little girl toddles unsteadily up to a stroller with an even littler boy. A woman in a pro-peace t-shirt leaves. A father holds his daughter to his chest and swings around in time with the Talking Heads tune that is playing.

The colors are cheery, the weather warm outside, the air blessedly smoke free. People come here for a beer or a glass of wine but I've never seen anyone drunk: it isn't that kind of place. It's a local kind of place.

On Sunday I came back from my weekend in Illinois while Lucy was out working at the community garden plot she shares with our neighbor Michelle and her daughter. When Lucy came home, she was stopped by another neighbor, Kathy, who gave us three chicken breasts with curry, some salad and some watermelon, and some cooked veggies, leftovers from her family's dinner.

This is why I live here: there's still a here, here.

edited to add: A man with gray hair stands by the cash register, unconsciously jigging up and down to the slow rhythmic rap tune that plays. When he turns to go, his head bobs, twice, with the downbeat.

1:20am: overheard
In the consuite: "His username ended in Q-O-Q.... You know, pronounced cock. This is Wiscon, it's ok to say that."

1:18am: happy burblings
Slowly reconnecting with friends, as time and crowd flow dynamics allow. juliebata and I ran into intelligentrix before the LiveJournal "Meatspace" party, and I suggested that intelligentrix should be our party's meat inspector, inspecting people and stamping them with an Approved Meat stamp. She grinned and said that was the best offer she'd had so far. fuzzygabby and I talked of old times. Later on, fuzzygabby and I sat with intelligentrix, who told us of how dispatchers at the cab company she drives for have a habit of sending out directions in terms of places that don't exist, as though they're calling in from some alternate universe. This turns out to be useful because it discourages drivers for rival companies from poaching fares.

Coming in after dinner, I ran into tandw checking in. Daughter J came running up, big hugs all around. Son A waved and hollered my name, so I went over to him, more hugs. A was with his friend W, who apparently decided to pre-empt the danger of being hugged by an old person in the middle of a hotel lobby by sticking out his hand to shake hands with me.

Later on this evening, A was calling me "Uncle Egon", and another longtime fan was puzzled, and asked him "Is he really related to you or do you just call him that", and, bless him, A seemed to be confused by the question. Years ago, J made a family tree in school, and Lucy and I ended up on it, along with several other friends of their parents who are not their relatives in any mainstream sense of the word. I am still touched by that. (For those LJ friends who don't know: tandw and their kids are not biological relatives, but from the time they were small they told J and A things like "Give your Aunt Lucy a hug good night", and we've always called them our niece and nephew.)

It occurs to me that I've know all of these people a long time - T of tandw, juliebataand fuzzygabby since the late 1980s, intelligentrix since 1979, and W of tandwsince 1980. I've known J and A since they were born. Years ago, a friend said "Wiscon is my college reunion", and she's right.

1:02am: I'm here
There's a local Vietnamese place on Park St, with the offbeat name of "I'm Here."

I'm here... at the Wiscon hotel. Had a chance to chat with truepenny for a bit. . Saw bibliofile and told her "It's so nice to see you ... if only you lived in town, we could do this more often." Another local told me "But she lives here now, didn't you know?" before realizing that I was being ironic. It sad but true that there are people who live in town who I only see here.

Oz: "That was my sarcastic voice."
Xander: "You know, that sounds a lot like your regular voice."
Oz: "I've been told that."

Had dinner with juliebata and holyoutlaw. Julie was a very good person and did not object when holyoutlaw and I were geeking out on camera stuff. Tomorrow, we go shopping for the LJ party.

Lucy couldn't get here until later, but we're all moved into the hotel and going to bed soon.