by Chris Barrus
I’ve had a variety of jobs over the years: fax machine repairman, auto deliverer, corporate spy, and various combinations of IT wrangler and network garbage collector. Couple months ago I added “television extra” to the list and here I am as “fifth guy from the left” (the tall one with his right arm in the air) in last night’s episode of Cold Case.
I have two memories of the World Trade Center, one is direct and one not.
My first visit to New York City was on July 3, 1986. In the following forty-eight hours I experienced the following:
On July 4, Nicholas, who was living in NYC at the time, and I tried to get into Windows On The World. We got as far as the elevator where the ground floor maitre d’ took one look at us and refused us entry because I was wearing blue jeans and neither one of us was wearing a tie. I wasn’t offended, in fact I muttered a bemused “wow, snooty New York service… Alright!” to myself. We ended up watching the fireworks from the south tower observation deck… My only regret was that I didn’t take a camera with me.
The indirect memory of the World Trade Center is a flyer and a video I have of Spiritualized’s 1997 show at Windows On The World as part of their “Highest shows on Earth” concerts. I wish I could have been there, I could have finally gotten into the place. (there’s a Real stream of the show here)
(advertisement from Asbestos magazine, November 1981. Found here and elsewhere.)
By applying to grad school of course…
Hell, in these days who doesn’t think about running away to grad school? It’s the A#1 double-plus-good refuge for intelligent social misfits and the self-ostracized. As a grad student you have full social permission to be one of those “oh, never mind him – he’s a grad student” guy.
To qualify, I only signed up to take the GRE. Call it an “exploratory foray” if you will, though I believe that the only people who use that phrase now are drug users, political candidates and the US Military. Helll, I’m not entirely sure that I even want to pursue it past the GRE stage as my dozen or so plus years as an IT Garbage Collector hasn’t yet made me want to stab myself. So far.
The object of all this hand-wringing is an urban planning degree. I love the field and it pays better than rock-and-roll.
The down side? Crushing amounts of anxiety, debt, and an uncertain future. A complete reverse-course for how I am now (in good spirits, debt free, and able to do my thing).
Since I can’t help but be Mr. Perversity, I scheduled myself to take the test on Friday the 13th (of October that is)
Another nice side-effect of switching blog software is tossing all the sidebar clutter that was fun to experiment around with for maybe fifteen minutes or so. Honestly, I was doing it for the JavaScript and PHP experience. No really!
Somewhere on there I ran across a blog entry big-upping BookMooch and of all the book-related networking sites out there, I kinda like this one. You get a point every time you give someone a book. You can keep a wish list, so you can auto-receive books when you have available points and when someone has a book you want.
I’ve got a stack of books that I’m not necessarily going to read again that the used book stores don’t really want to buy, and I’d rather give stuff away to someone who wants to read it.
Shockingly, all the old posts migrated over without incident. Not bad for something that’s gone through Radio Userland and three major revisions of Movable Type. I wish I had just switched sooner because after redoing the templates just a couple months ago, I have to do it all over again. What’s with all the WordPress/CSS stunt pilots out there who love making styles that are entirely unmutual with text readability. I swear I’m just going to redo everything with typewriter fonts.
Three things I thought would happen that have come true.
Ban on all carry-on luggage on airlines
When predicted: Early 2002
When the new TSA rules went into effect after 9/11, I figured that it would be only a matter of time when the prohibition would be expanded to include all carry-ons. As of this morning, this has now happened because of fear of “the liquid bomb.” Of course, fear sells a lot of ad revenue regardless of whether the fear is reasonable or even makes any goddamn sense (quote from CNN: “Don’t use your cellphone within 50 feet of a suspicious object, you might detonate something…”) Case in point, these TSA workers who have ordered “potentially dangerous liquids” to be emptied into a tank of other “potentially dangerous liquids.” Maybe it’s just me, but don’t you think that if something is airplane-unsafe, a big container full of the stuff in an airport is, um, really unsafe?
Remember, the TSA is here to protect you.
Anyone care to take any wagers on how long this ban will stay in effect and/or when it is expanded to include domestic flights? Assuming that the terrorist plot of this morning is legitimate, you could argue that the terrorists achieved a partial success in terms of permanently disrupting passenger air traffic, given now that you’re recommended to arrive at an airport a full four hours before departing.
Also, anyone care to wager on how soon this “victory over terrorism” will be connected to a strong and vigorous domestic spying program?
Soviet-style tourism (not to be confused with Soviet-era tourism)
When predicted: Early 1991
As soon as the Berlin Wall collapsed and Germany set about reunifying, I predicted that Checkpoint Charlie would become a tourist attraction and that paintball fans would soon be re-enacting escapes with one group playing the East German military and the other group as escapees. I suppose it was a little too much for the Irvine Albertsons grocery store I was in when I was exclaiming this to friends, as some guy shouted “that’s not funny!” at me.
Apparently, the current lag time between political oppression and ironic political oppression entertainment is fifteen years. Take a trip to Club Gulag…
Care to stay the night in a former KGB prison in Latvia? How about a weekend in an abandoned gulag 100 miles above the Arctic Circle? Or do you just want to make like a Volga boatman, pulling a barge up the river? According to The Age, the night at the KGB prison is already a hot destination for masochistic tourists. “On some nights, for extra money, they call out the guard, and the shivering guests can witness a mock execution, with the ‘corpse’ being flung like a sack of potatoes into a lorry before being driven away, presumably for a reviving cuppa,” Allan Hall writes. “Once past the humiliating stripping and donning of prison garb, the gruelling physical exercise regime, the interrogation and the solitary confinement cell—for those that answer back to Ivan—there is dinner. It is a delicious melange of stale rye bread, pickled fish heads, pressed meat from some unidentifiable mammal, pickles and black, sweet Russian tea.”
Manic home buying speculators = Manic home losing foreclosings
When predicted: 2005
Home buyers in 2006 = tulip speculators
“Orange County’s foreclosures nearly doubled in June, rising to 65 property sales from 35 in May. Overall, foreclosure activity, including default warnings to delinquent homeowners, was up 60 percent last month, the report shows. The county had 639 new foreclosure filings last month, up from 399 in May.”
As one commenter noticed, a big November housing tax installment payment may put a big wet blanket on Christmas spending. Stay tuned for unexpected ripple effects coming soon to a shaky economy near you!
Like I’m surprised at ALL by this…
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Lately I’ve been busy preparing for a job interview today, so in lieu of the usual assortment of high weirdness and diner pictures (and to keep my mind off of things) I’ve added some “Web 2.0” crap on the sidebar. Yay…
It’s uncommon enough for me to remember my dreams, but what’s incredibly unusual is the amount of vivid dreams I’ve been having – almost every night now. Maybe it’s the anxiety or something. Anyway, here are three recent ones from the past week or so:
1. Me and a friend who passed away last year had a substantial discussion of our favorite models of vintage Volkswagens. He preferred Vanagons (he camped a lot) while I went on about Squarebacks. We both agreed that Things are the coolest though neither of us wanted one.
2. I found myself walking down a very wide and flat beach that sloped up shallowly inland to some rocky bluffs. Nothing too disimilar from places I’ve been at along the Queensland coast of Australia or even New Jersey but for some reason it felt European. A jeep drove up to me, Terry Gilliam hopped out and asked me if I wanted to be in a scene in a movie. “Sure!” I answered, and he told me that all I needed to do was to open up the trap door at my feet and then pull a plug out of a drain. I looked down and sure enough, there was a foot-square wooden door there with a slight film of wet sand over it. Gilliam hopped back in the jeep, reminded me to “Don’t pull it yet until I give you the signal,” and then sped off. I stood around for a bit and then I hear a tremendous and startling “ACTION!” that seemed to come from inside my head. Suddenly a couple dozen SUVs and minivans speed down the beach – not towards me, just parallel to the coast. Gilliam calls out “OK, PULL THE PLUG!” in that same pseudo-telepathic voice and I pull up the door and find a rusty metal sink underneath it. There’s no water in it, but the stopper is in the drain. I pull the plug out and I hear a rumble from onshore – it’s a giant wave of water that rushes over the rocks and washes all the vehicles out to sea. Gilliam intones “PERFECT!” and I continue walking down the beach.
3. I was in an airport in Germany. Well, I’m not exactly sure that it was Germany, but the signage was all in German. I had just missed my plane (I don’t remember what my destination was) and there wasn’t another flight for several days. The woman at the ticket counter motioned out the window and said “there’s always that,” pointing to a pristine-condition 1920s-era zeppelin anchored at the far end of the airport. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, so I thanked her for her help and ran out of the terminal towards it. The zeppelin was crewed entirely by German-speaking racoons of all sizes and shapes… Captain Racoon was almost as tall as I was and with enough broken English on their part (I don’t know any German) we figured out that where I was going was along their route and so off we went. Pretty opulent ship I gotta say, my cabin was very posh for 1920s-standard travel and after a full day and night of travel I departed somewhere in the Alps. Smooth flight, about the only event was that some baby racoons got into my luggage at some point and scattered loose change about the cabin.
Someday I’m going to write a children’s book about that last one…
iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM) analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent who you are and what you listen to. After it checks your system configuration and asks you a few simple questions, iTSM will spend a few minutes analyzing your collection and generating the audio signature.
So I fed it my music collection and got the following mp3 file:
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