Whatta Fiasco

Let’s see. Max is unemployed again (or was still the other day), but the reason doesn’t speak badly of him and he seems to be handling the situation well. Things at home are pretty much otherwise unchanged.

I finished the Popper (Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2) before it was due back at the library. Just barely. I learned that Hegel was an evil and unscrupulous sell-out, while Marx was well-intentioned, insightful, brilliant in Popper’s judgment. I’m still reasonably impressed by Popper’s presentation, and I was rooting for him right up to the end when he launched into a religion based refutation of historicism. There’s nothing like using the last fifty pages to explain that you consider the previous four-hundred to have been a waste of time. I can still highly recommend both volumes.

I also finished Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate, where he presents his take on the nature versus nurture argument, even though I nearly gave up on it half way through. The first few chapters were golden, giving a starkly realistic view of how nasty science can get. Steven Gould playing the bad guy? Amazing. But past that point, there was surprisingly little that I found surprising at all. Other than the painfully frequent attempts at using contemporary examples. Eh. It was a warranted attempt, but it came off sounding strained. Once again, it was the final chapter that smudged the effect. After slogging through several hundred pages of carefully reasoned and footnoted arguments, he launched into a discussion of the arts that threw all that care to the wind. Bzzt. Even given the reservations I have about postmodernism, I’m not willing to concede that people don’t like them because they’ve rejected human nature.

On the fencing front, I was supposed to go to Salina, Kansas this weekend to fence in the Division Qualifiers. If I had finished in the top thirty percent I would have qualified to fence in Division II women’s epee, and just by competing at all I would have qualified to fence Division III. But Ariadne and I were the only ones who registered for the event, so we’re automatically qualified for both events without having to fence. It would have been silly to have two club mates drive three hours each way to fence two bouts. But hubby still has to compete on Sunday and I have to be there on Saturday to attend the division meeting as club representative. And I’ll get to cheer on my club mates before the meeting, so all is not lost. Also, I’m still getting ready an even bigger tournament weekend after next, so there’s much fencing in my immediate future.

Have I mentioned that March is a busy month for me? The coding pixies have been slacking off but they’re still working on getting the book blog back online. Those darn pixies want a nice big block of uninterrupted time and that’s proving difficult to schedule. Then there’s the writing I need to get done this week, right now. Last week would be even better, but the pixies are still working the kinks out of the time machine. No ETA. (But they promise that once they get it to work, they can deliver it as early as I need it.) My brain doesn’t want to write. My brain doesn’t want to code. My brain wants to doodle and read silly books while the pixies do all the heavy lifting. My brain wants to spend whole afternoons sitting in the warm sunshine we don’t have yet. Poor brain. Life isn’t fair. We’re still discussing a compromise.

In a completely unrelated move, this afternoon I passed up a chance to try chicken noodel soup. Yes, noodel. Does it make you yoodel when you it eat? We may never know.

It was a quiet weekend. Saturday was mostly sleeping, fencing, and driving around in the rain. Sunday was spent doing much reading and enjoying the sunshine. I finished Eco’s Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language after who knows how many years of owning it and mumbledy months of reading it off and on. Eh. Some interesting bits but a little too jargon heavy over all for the casual reader. Pick something else. I’m considering not finishing Fernando Pessoa’s, The Book of Disquiet, a sort of memoir written by one of his alter egos (heteronyms). Good writing, very good writing, but depressing. Even knowing that it’s a mostly fictional memoir and an interesting study on the nature of identity doesn’t help. But while I was at the library on Sunday I found Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee sitting on the shelf next to William Calvin’s The Ascent of Mind. Both authors were on my to-read list, but not those titles. Still, it was too much to pass up so I got both, especially after flipping open the Calvin book to find the sentence, And even if we explain the origin of Homo sapiens, there is still the problem of accounting for how Hungarians happened. I couldn’t resist.

Also on Sunday I did the horrible and went clothes shopping. It’s one of those need to do it and get it over activities that I tend to put off too long. But there was a sale in town at a store where I don’t normally shop, so I decided to check it out. I couldn’t call it an unqualified success as I only came home with on pair of slacks, but they’re red corduroy, and they fit marvelously well, and they were only seven bucks. Apparently women my size are supposed to have enormous bellies and no butt to speak of. These pants, however, were made for me, and for once they were an even smaller size than I had expected to need. They fit and I am happy, but I still need to do some more shopping, sometime. Maybe the thought of needing to pick out smaller sizes will make the next shopping trip easier.

Things I don’t particularly want to talk about right now: the pledge of allegiance, same sex marriage, promotion of marriage as an antipoverty measure, genital piercing, the Bush administration, welfare mothers, don’t ask don’t tell, the Iraqi constitution, intelligent design. If I agree with you, I’m even less likely to talk to you on one of these topics (and many others), at least for now. Shall we shout our agreement in anger at one another? Shall we bewail the world into fairness? I don’t have the patience to beat down walls, let alone disassemble them gently and help to rebuild, stone upon stone. Brick up my mouth. Not today.
Today is cool and cloudy. Today is hot tea and bitter chocolate. I settled for the chocolate and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Ha! What a devious man. I’d been warned that it was a very confusing movie, and it did a good job of being tortuously twisty. A wild ride, but it almost all made sense at the end. Just remember that no matter how random things seem, they’re all there for a reason. And I love how Lynch follows formula by injecting a thoroughly literal symbol just as everything is falling apart to clue you in, just in case you don’t get it yet. I’ll give it four out of five nuts; it’s crazy good.

Less good was finding out that my mother-in-law had won another one point five million dollars. No, really. She got an official looking letter and everything. All she has to do is send in a twenty dollar processing fee. I don’t know how some people sleep at night.

It was a good weekend, but I so did not want to get up this morning. My body is tired and cranky and completely disavows any knowledge of the eight plus hours per night of sleep I got all weekend. I don’t know what’s up with that.
Friday night’s concert met and exceeded expectations. A female quartet singing thirteenth century chant in a recently restored cathedral downtown? Divine. The large and numerous columns dictated by the architecture made it difficult to see anything of the performers, but the sound was glorious. And it wasn’t until part way through the second piece that I realized how much Benjamin Britten’s work owes to, well, thirteenth century chant. Everything old is new again, including early music harmonic motion. Figuring that out made Britten’s work make much more sense.

On Saturday morning we slept in a bit and then drove into Kansas City to have tapas with a group of friends. There were twelve of us so we started with one of everything off the tapas menu. Then we ordered extra shrimp. chicken, and beef so that everyone who wanted some would get a taste. A few silly people passed on the calamari (not breaded and fried) and there were very silly indeed. The only downsides were the price (which, to be fair, was exactly what I had expected) and the shortage of flan. This one will be getting a repeat visit.

Saturday afternoon and early evening were a mad whirl of moving and packing and checking and stacking. This time we had a small army, a couple of dozen donuts, killer chili, and both Guinness and some home-brewed blueberry mead. (Many thanks to M. Dragonfly for contributing the mead!) I’m sad to see them go but we’ll be seeing them again soon. Oklahoma isn’t that far away. My arms will eventually stop being sore. We had had thoughts about trying to do something later in the evening to celebrate our anniversary, but decided to just go home and be lazy, saving something more formal for later.
Sunday was more laziness with morning bagels and some conversation on a variety of topics. Motorcycles, house repair, family issues. Then we went and bought a paper shredder for the house. I’d been meaning to do that for some weeks now after measuring the height of the piles of old bills threatening to wither bury me or at least make me feel guilty about not keeping them organized. Then it struck me that in a house with too many things that have no place, I had a pile of things with no place that served no useful purpose. So I brought home my new, noisy, sounds-like-a-vacuum-cleaner shredder and set about sorting the pile to remove the papers I might need and turn the rest into several garbage bags of crosscut confetti. I’m still not done with the project. And when I’ve finished the first pass, I’ll go back over the stack again to see what got saved that should instead be consigned.

Sunday night hubby and I went out to dinner with Ms. K and her parents at the new Indian buffet in town. It’s a small place with limited selection and not a lot of food, but what was there was tasty. No mixed pickles and I would have enjoyed a broader range of spicy, but the lamb vindaloo was tender and the fish tikka was tasty enough to get seconds. I’m still not entirely sure how this became a weekend of food, but at least it was good food.

Are you looking for a wire fu, costume drama with eunuchs, a cross-dressing woman, a little bit of Sweeney Todd, and lots of sand? (And then it goes completely over the top.) Go take a look at Tsui Hark’s Dragon Inn. Maggie Cheung (as Jade, the inn owner) and Donnie Yen (as Tsao Siu Yan aka the Bad Guy) are both flamboyant and colorful, a joy to watch. Don’t get put off by the corny beginning, especially if you’re not used to Hong Kong movies. Look past the silliness and you might find a film you can enjoy, assuming you don’t mind the blood.

Books I didn’t buy last night while browsing through the bookstore: Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper, Consequences of Pragmatism by Richard Rorty, Alien Emergencies by James White, Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, and assorted others. That road is paved with empty wallets, flaccid bank accounts, and undigested credit card bills. Besides, I still have a small stack of books at home to be read. I was good.

Instead I finished A Void by Georges Perec, a lipogram translated into English by Gilbert Adair. Fantastical, absurd, flippant, outstanding and funny. I had heard about this book before, while reading , but had forgotten about it. I grabbed it off the shelf because it had turned up in another list of interesting books I’d found somewhere. It wasn’t until I was into the second paragraph that I realized what I had in hand. It’s a tour de force of word play and a parody of murder mystery whodunnits, all written entirely without the letter E. Nor does he make it easy on himself; within you will find (among many other amazing things) a synopsis of Moby Dick that references both the whale and Queequeg without using any E’s. There’s also a complete version of Poe’s The Raven with the last verse turned to serve as a lament by the author over the difficulty of the task. (Self reference, both textual and structural, is pernicious to the point of being another character in the story.) And if that wasn’t enough, the original book was written in French, without the forbidden vowel, and then crazy M. Adair came along and translated it into English, also avoiding that glyph. It sounds precious and strained, but it’s laugh aloud funny in places. The book appears to be out of print (alas!) but it’s worth tracking down a copy if you like word play at all. Right now I’m wondering about a lipogrammatic Scrabble game. But what would you call it?

Speak of the devil and he appears: only last night I mentioned to hubby that I hadn’t run across a mention of Jacob Nielsen in ages and ages whereas only a year ago (two years ago? time flies…) you couldn’t read anything web design related without tripping over a mention of him. Has he become entirely irrelevant? Naturally I trip over a mention of him almost first thing this morning. Serves me right.

It’s going to be a full weekend for me and there’s plenty going on, including some limited celebration of ten years of being married. (Did I mention that time flies?) Enjoy your weekend.

Opera again, but this time it was Benjamin Britten. And my addle pated brain. Somewhere along the way I got it into my head that I had Wednesday night tickets for the show. Never mind that I’m on my second season of Monday night tickets. Whoops. If I’d been thinking ahead it would have been no problem to get the ticket exchanged for a Wednesday night ticket. Luckily the crowd was light and the box office manager decided I probably wasn’t trying to scam my way into seeing the opera for free.

It took some time for me to warm to the opera itself. Modern music works just a little too hard at not being what you expect it to be, but once you get used to the idiom (and give up on having anything to hum on your way home), it’s very pretty stuff. I was not terribly impressed by the countertenor playing Oberon. His voice was lovely but it was only a little bit better at selling the emotion of the character than was the stage presence of the singer. Then there was Francis Flute aka Thisby singing deliberately off-key and stealing every scene not taken by Snug aka the Lion. But the glory of the piece is the ensemble work. The quartet when the lovers awake at the beginning of the third act is particularly memorable.

I’ve already updated my calendar with the correct date for Don Giovanni.

Today has been a day of dealing with people incapable of stating their problems and requirements with sufficient detail and consistency to allow me to determine if there’s any way I can help them. And if you’re going to contact me for technical support, it helps if you have your own account instead of appropriating someone else’s and simply not mentioning it. Ignore the grumbling.

On Thursday we got a sane start to the drive down and arrived at about 8pm after a short detour to Nowhere to drop Lisa off with her mom. And then found a Texas steak house near the hotel. We walked into the place and were assaulted by the sound of a mediocre Thursday night country band, a band that ended up spending more time doing sound checks and fiddling with their equipment than they did actually playing music. And when they did get around to playing, the highlight of the evening was the Chicken Dance. I honestly didn’t think anyone played that song except at weddings. And the food was nothing to write home about. Hubby got a passable prime rib, but the smoked chicken was too smoked for the Monk’s taste, the steak on Ariadne’s salad was seriously overcooked and mine was over salted. And no decent beer. We deemed it a cultural immersion experience and vowed not to repeat it again if possible.

Friday morning came cloudy and early with an 8am check in time for Division III Women’s Epee. Neither of the guys were fencing that day, so they helped schlep gear around and check weapons. Over the course of the weekend, we managed never to all be fencing at the same time, so there was almost always someone available to fetch, strip coach, or at least cheer. My pool this year was much harder than the one I had at this event last year and it showed in my results, even though I was fencing a lot better this year than last year. Or at least I feel like a better fencer. Last year I had at least three touches on everyone in my pool. This year the best I did was four, and I had one bout (against the number one seed) where I got no touches at all. It was more than a little depressing and frustrating. To top it off, I made the mistake of checking my seeding after pools. Big mistake. I was last out of sixty-one. I went into my direct elimination bout feeling about three feet tall against someone I should have been able to beat. I beat myself. The way direct elimination works, coming in last doesn’t mean you’re the worst fencer competing any more than coming in first means your the best. And I know that measured against my own progress I’m doing just fine. Knowing that intellectually and knowing it emotionally are two different things.

Dinner on Friday night was at the Chinese buffet next door to the disastrous steak place. It was much better, and spending some time in the hot tub at the hotel afterward was even better yet. Oh, and in the middle of my five days of being unplugged from the great internet universe, Jon tracked me down on Friday. It was very good timing and we had a cheerful if short chat, getting caught up on the last six months or so. The good news is that he’s employed and they just bought a house a few weeks ago. (A poke in the eye, however, to the maudes of employment who have left him in a position where his skills are vastly underutilized. I’m just glad he’s not working at the filling station!) And then there was much sleep.

Saturday morning was bright and early again, this time for Veteran Men’s Epee (one-hundred and eight of them!) for hubby and Division II Men’s Foil for Monk. Good fencing. The afternoon was Division II Women’s Epee. I was still in bad attitude city after the previous day’s results. I was dealing with recurrent thoughts of what the hell am I doing here, why am I wasting my money and everyone else’s time? Bad, but I fenced and fenced fairly well for me. My indicators were even worse than the day before but my fencing was better. Still, it was depressing. Remembering the blow to the stomach from the day before, I carefully did not check the seeding after pools. Then they posted the direct elimination tableau and I found out I was fencing Ariadne for my first bout. Argh! It was a decent bout that didn’t overtax her much, and then I withdrew to lick my metaphorical wounds and recover while she went on to finish fourteenth. (Comparing arms later in the weekend, we noticed that the women got many fewer bruises from fencing epee than the men did. Interesting.)

Dinner on Saturday night was going to be at a particular decent chain restaurant, and we even got the nice folks helping run the tournament to give us a map to find the nearest one. Alas, they led us astray. Perhaps there used to be a copy of the restaurant in that retail area once, but not now. We decided that another Big Chain establishment would suffice. (Are you seeing a pattern of fence-eat-sleep-fence-eat-sleep? You’re not imagining things.) I had my only beer of the weekend, a Sam Adam’s, not delivered by the clearly new and nearly clueless waitress who was too young to handle the stuff. Many starchy vegetables were consumed without any Chicken Songs at all. And then there was sleeping.

Sunday was my day for recuperation. I got to fetch and carry and test weapons. I got to be jealous of the women who got to compete in the veteran’s event that day. (I’m still too young! Two more years to go.) Ariadne fenced in Division II Women’s foil and won her first foil DE bout. Hubby and Monk fenced the Division II Men’s Epee, with Hubby getting (just barely) knocked out by the number one seed and Monk making it to fifteenth, just missing his B!

Even a bad day of fencing is a good day, and this was a day of good fencing. To celebrate the end of the tournament, we decided to have some sushi. Easier said than done on a Sunday night in Arlington, Texas. After quite a bit of wandering around and false hopes dashed, we stumbled across Piranha Sushi, or Piranha Killer Sushi. Whatever they call themselves, it was just the ticket. Oddly, we did no nigiri at all, opting for an assortment of their specialty rolls. (If you ever get there, the Forget About It roll is divine, as is the Dancing Eel roll.) Monk had never tried sushi before and gamely dove in, only to find that it really did taste of fish. Alas. But no fish went uneaten and a good time was had by all.

Monday was our roller coaster day spent out at Six Flags. Much adrenalin. The Mr. Freeze was finally open so I got to ride it. Twice. I had never seen anyone riding the thing and had begun suggesting that perhaps it was not really a roller coaster at all. When we got halfway through the line the first time only to be told that it was going to be closed for ten to fifteen minutes due to technical difficulties, I decided it was a psych experiment. We waited it out while telling riddles. It was worth it. One-thousand four-hundred and eighty feet in thirty-five seconds. And I am now the possessor of a season pass that I hope to use at least twice more before the year is over. I like roller coasters. What was amazing was that I still had feet on the ends of my legs when we hopped in the car at eight in the evening to do the long overnight drive back home.

So, a good weekend. And for Saint Patrick’s Day, instead of drinking green beer, I’m going to go hear Benjamin Britten’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It should be fun.

I’m back. I’m alive. I survived. I had fun. The house is still standing in one piece. The cat doesn’t want to let me out of her sight. Texas still has only a limited concept of the idea of beer and a crazy idea of what constitutes a usable highway system. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.

Dear Tommy Thompson,
Unhealthy nutrition plus a sedentary lifestyle do not automatically equal obesity. I know because there’s a living, breathing example in my house right now.
More importantly, I found out last night that a friend of mine in the reserves is being activated and is expecting to be overseas by sometime this summer. Crap. After all this time. Here’s hoping everything goes well.

It’s been a good couple of days, but busy. And they’re only the precursor to more busy-ness and some delayed decision making as to what sorts of busy will be happening when and where. After work tonight I beat feet for the soccer store to get some new socks. My old ones have lost their sticky and I have too much fencing to do this weekend to be worrying about pulling my socks up every three minutes. Green socks make for happy feet. Just ignore the used book store two doors down from the soccer store.

And now I’m going to go get the rest of my laundry done and figure out what I’m going to have for dinner.

Some Prefer Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki: I went looking for The Makioka Sisters at my library, but it was checked out. Instead I picked up this one, and found it difficult to leave the library without finishing it first. It didn’t last the day. It’s a slim two hundred pages of the cool, intense emotion that for me marks a Japanese novel. (It compares well, if not quite coming up to the level of, Kawabata’s Snow Country.) There’s also a pleasant overlap in settings with the title story from Yukio Mishima’s collection, Acts of Worship.

Not satisfied with that, I dug into P.B. Medawar’s The Limits of Science, an even shorter and pithy volume that I can recommend unreservedly. The language may stray into the over blown and overly self conscious (but not without Medawar pricking his own balloon), but this would be an excellent book to put in the hands of any youngster uncertain whether she has what it takes to be a scientist. You’ll enjoy it too.

Still waiting in the book bag and showing great promise are Georges Perec’s A Void and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. I can’t wait.