Whatta Fiasco

We had a big thunderstorm roll through the area yesterday afternoon. Big, but fast moving. The rain started just as I was walking back from lunch and had (more or less) finished by the time I left for home. But there in the middle, we had the power bounce in our office building four times in the space of an hour. After the second time, I stopped rebooting my computer and found some other stuff to do. I sure hope we don’t go through this every time a thunderstorm comes through all summer. It’s annoying, but it’s very hard on the poor computers.

I made a new friend at the gym last night: Mr. Rowing Machine. It as only a brief introduction but we’re getting along famously. I especially liked the way the machine gave an instantaneous read out of the kilocalories per hour for each stroke, setting up an incentive to better the number each time. Now I want a cute little screen showing my target of choice, and each stroke lobs a stone from a trebuchet at the target with the force of the missile being determined by the strength of the stroke. You could batter down castles, corporate high rises, sink battleships. Lots of fun.

After the gym I stopped by my local natural foods store and discovered that they’re now carrying Greek style yoghurt! If you can imagine an unsweetened sour cream custard, that’s exactly what it tastes like. It’s amazing stuff (you can read about it here – I had the Total 2%) and went well with the roasted beet salad I snagged out of the deli case. One of these days I’ll get around to learning how to make my own yoghurt. Until then I settle for replicating that roasted beets with fresh herbs salad I had. I noticed a sign the other day on the closed for renovations deli downstairs. Projected opening date: May 15. It’s past time to ramp up the bring you lunch to work project.

Kim Ki-Duk tells a tale of the sorrows of life and the bitter joys they can bring. Gorgeous and touching.

Very sad.

It’s not every Friday morning you get to start with a car on fire in the parking garage at work. I was half way up the ramps to my usual parking spot when the fire alarms started flashing and a security guard on a segway came by to let us know it wasn’t a false alarm. Please turn around and leave the parking garage. Joy. By the time I made it around the block and found a metered spot on the street (bye bye quarters!) greasy black smoke was billowing around the firemen and the police were blocking off the street right behind me. Final tally was three crispy cars towed away. I’m fairly glad I was just a little bit late to work because it happened not far from where I normally park.

Yesterday I started my morning with fortification spectra. I was still at home, gathering my stuff to leave for work, when I felt like I had something floaty in my eye obstructing my vision. And then I noticed the slightly sparkling triangles of the same sort I had the only other time I’ve noticed a visual aura. Over the course of a minute it spread out into a classic C curve, but this one was in my left eye instead of my right and it was neither as crisp nor as bright as last time either. It’s still just as weird (particularly being able to feel that you have a blind spot but not being able to see it), but it was once again completely gone in much less than ten minutes.

Once again, there was no associated headache, for which I am grateful. To celebrate I ordered copies of both V for Vendetta and Watchmen, along with a few other books I’ve been wanting. (Newton’s Wake, The Confusion, and Black Brillion.) They should all show up at about the same time that I finish the last of my current crop of library books and am due to pick out another load. Happy books.

If you’re avoiding spoilers for this film, stop here and just go see it.

This may have been a case where not having read the source material may have improved my viewing experience. It wasn’t a great film, but it was a moving one. And, even better, I spent a few hours afterward unpacking all the details I could remember. The V symbols are, of course, everywhere, all the way down to a smear of blood on a wall. But the twin arms of the V are also present in many parallel structures in the film. The twinned scenes of hiding under the bed from the police, the twinned rebirth scenes. The paired betrayals were less heavy-handed and more divergent. But one of my favorite parallels in the film is formed by the deaths of Dr. Surridge and V. The tone of her death scene prepares us for his, and she (representing all of the victimizers) issues the apology he never does. But even more importantly, we get to experience and let go of grief over his death early so that it doesn’t get in the way of the triumphal ending and release. I can see where the deviation from the source would be upsetting, but I thought it was well handled in the context of the film. (And now I need to go get a copy of that original!)

Two other details I enjoyed: I liked how Dietrich’s television show stood in the place of the film itself. Here we are, it says, using lies to tell the truth in a way no one can deny. Will you send your troops to do battle with the truth? Now pay close attention to William Hurt’s eyes. We encounter him(except in flashback footage) as a disembodied head with no discernible background on a large television screen, very Max Headroom like. The people facing him are in a dark room. He is not, but his pupil s stay fully dilated, even as his fear becomes all too apparent. Whether you pick up on it consciously or not, it’s a clear signal that the man is crazy. It isn’t until he is rudely pulled out of his frame and brought to some kind of justice in the second betrayal scene, that his pupils contract and he becomes both human and vanquished. (Did they do the pupil in enlargement in post-production or did they dilate William Hurt’s eyes?)

Someone else can do the riff on how the film portrays those who give everything away (V even gives away his identity by distributing the masks) attain their goals, while those who hold tight to status and power all fail.

And I finished this one just days before it got short listed for a Hugo. I approve. In fact, so far this is my favorite of his novels (although I still need to grab a copy of Newton’s Wake). Aside from it being a well-written book and an entertaining story, I was most pleased at the way Ken incorporated some of his political thinking into the story without overwhelming it. The politics informs and assists the plot instead of vying for principal character status.

For some reason I’ve been avoiding collections of stories lately. Silly me. I’m glad I picked this one up form the library and got to know Henghis Hapthorn, the Archonate’s foremost discriminator. When being introduced to a detective with a brain the size of the universe (which may not be all his own), his artifactual artificially conscious sidekick, and a demoniacally nameless puzzle loving colleague, small bites are wise. The other stories are good too, but Henghis Hapthorn is now a part of the pantheon.

Because of travel, I only had two practices last week. Both involved inconsistent levels of fencing, and Friday was worse on that front than Wednesday. It didn’t leave me feeling very confident going into a small tournament this weekend.

We had six vets in the vet epee, some usual suspects and two folks I hadn’t fenced before. The dreaded inconsistency wasn’t in serious evidence and I was actually reasonably pleased with how I was fencing, minus the errors and the lack of a warm up. Ugh. But at least I missed my warm up because I was helping coach one of our younger fencers in her second ever foil event. But I still could have done more warm up on my own. The other problem was one of focus, particularly in my DE. And that was partly caused by a lingering sense of guilt over having hit my opponent in pools hard enough (with her help in positioning herself) to make her apply ice to her wrist after the bout. I beat her for my one victory in pools, but then faced her in my DE. It was 7-7 at the break and we were both fencing well. Then she came back better focused than I was. We got to 9-9 and she got the final touch. Which is officially the closest I’ve come to winning a DE. I can celebrate that, but I am so very much looking forward to getting over this psychological hurdle. Because it really is a problem in my head, not in my ability to fence. Oh, and I didn’t come in last. And I had my best results ever against both Ramsey-Washburn and Sikes. And my club mate took first, while his daughter took 5th of 10 in the 12 and under dry foil event. It was a good afternoon of fencing.

Next possible event is Divisional Qualifiers next weekend. We’re still waiting to find out if enough women signed up to let us fence off the Div II event.

Pitzel 1-5
Hartley 3-5
Sikes 3-5
Chambers 1-5
Ramsey-Washburn 5-1

DE
Ramsey-Washburn 9-10

Here’s a Hong Kong romantic comedy that won’t need any explanation to understand it. The leads, Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Sammi Cheng, are both pretty and they work well together, and the story is sweet. Pleasant entertainment.

A vacation with no fencing! We drove to Chicago to spend the weekend doing nothing much in particular other than museum hopping. The big excitement of the trip was getting up Sunday morning to find that Larryville had a big storm blo through taking out power and damaging a number of buildings, including a trailer park not far from our house. Should we cut the vacation short and drive straight home? No, there wasn’t much we could do. The cat was safely at the vet’s for the weekend. We did end up driving straight back home Sunday night instead of splitting it into a more leisurely two-part affair, but all was well (minus a number of roof shingles and a few dead limbs) when we got home.

How was the weekend? Fun. We stayed in a hotel near O’Hare airport and took the train into downtown both days. Saturday was a glorious afternoon filled with people dressed in green. We eventually figured out that the crowds were mostly out for the St. Patrick’s Day parade that was taking place on the other side of Millenium Park. We heard the bagpipes in the distance. I also got to watch people ice skating outdoors in seventy degrees. And I’ve decided that Frank Gehry is just insane. But the Kapoor sculpture really is amazing. And the Chicago Art Institute is still a fun place and I still haven’t seen the entire thing. It was a little surreal to be walking through an art gallery where every fourth person or so was wearing the Irish. Just strange. But the selection of Japanese prints was as excellent as it always seems to be when I visit.

Sunday was a hike out to the Museum Campus to go visit the fishies at the Shedd Aquarium. Except there was a line a mile long wending its way down the steps. So, off we went to the boring old Field Museum with no visible lines at all. Except there was a line giding inside. But! A fortuitous quesiton (Military? Former military?) got us free entrance to the museum proper without any of the special exhibits. That was fine. Tibetan horsehair goggles, Pacific rim slit drums, an adz whose head was bound to the handle with a braided fiber in as intricate a pattern as any you’re going to find on a Japanese sword, and various ordinary items with holes punched in them by meteorites. And when we were finished there, we stilll had some time, so we went back to the Shedd and only had a short line to wait in.

And I haven’t even mentioned the woman in the shiny tiara at the breakfast buffet or the cursing monologists in the subway, or the Red Wings hockey fans at the Ram Restaurant and Brewhouse (which turns out to be a chain out of Washington), nor the hefeweizen they brew there that has a distinct and pleasant banana note to it. A good time was had, at least by us.