Hey, that thing got a Hemi?

My friends have just bought their first impulse-buy car: a bright yellow Corvette. You have to know these people in order to see how amazingly insane this all is - they are both hard working, quiet, middle class folks (not without humour), with, apparently, a wild side hungering for speed... So now I can't get that Dodge Hemi commercial tagline out of my head (and it has become our standard joke that when I exclaim that their car has a hemi - which, in all truth, I don't think it has - they yell back "Sweeeeet!"). I think it is because we are down South, and we're surrounded by lots of other muscular cars and trucks (which is a really big deal down here). Besides being ridiculously fast, I suspect this car can also become a Transformer (although my friends haven't initiated that option yet). Paradoxically, I was never a car person - although I do have a soft spot for Maru-chan - so I can't get too jazzed by this bumble bee rocket car in the drive way (don't worry Maru-chan, just ignore it - you'll always be special to me!). However, I am happy for my friends, as they do seem to derive much enjoyment doing doughnuts in the street and making smoke shows at traffic lights for the benefit of the locals...And speaking of Sweeeeet, does anyone out there like Matthew Sweet? Not a day goes by when I'm not humming some song off of Girlfriend or 100% Fun (and isn't that album just the perfect music to make you feel a little better when your day is running you down?). I'm beginin' to think, baby you don't know!

Sky Going Crazy-Go-Nuts

Wow... Well, we finally got our tornadoish weather Thursday night, and it was amazing. Clouds just poured into an otherwise clear sky just about sunset; it got warmer and the wind began to pick up. Then the radio emitted the signal from the Emergency Alert System, and a tornado warning was issued. We watched the clouds start to swirl around and get angry - with sporadic lightning at first, but with more and more electrical action going on as the sky got suddenly and noticeably darker. It began to rain in buckets and clouds were trucking along above us in distinct altitudes and groups (but overall the sky was overcast). At the height of the storm the lightning was nearly continuous and it lit up the area sometimes brighter than day. Luckily the golfball-sized hail didn't hit us (just south of our neighborhood) and some funnels were said to have touched down, but luckily not near any inhabited areas. It was amazing!
Now I understand why nobody in Close Encounters of the Third Kind was put off by those suspicious storm clouds that the aliens used to mask their movements just before they popped in to abduct folks. Its just par for the course here in the Ohio Valley.
On a sad note: the next morning I went running and there was no sign of my killdeer. Did the nest get washed away, and my anxiously feathered friend along with it? I hope not!

Red Dust Under My Fingernails

Yup, last Saturday my friends and I spread out most of that red lava rock along the side of the house - raising heaps of iron oxide-coloured dust. My job was to shovel the stuff into the wheel barrow, haul it over to the site and dump it. Repeat. I realised that I don't want to get a job hauling volcanic rock around. Anyways, as the day wore on - and it was hot and sunny - all this red dust started kinda reminding me of Australia (and I kept hearing Midnight Oil in my head over and over: "...River runs red, Black rain falls...") and I half expected road trains and koalas to start appearing across the desiccated front lawn (the grass seed didn't really take root in the clay they have here, which is why we had to start putting down top soil, which got washed away by all the rain earlier this month - look for the earlier posts, which explain that in greater detail...). Maybe it was the heat and manual labour, but things got a little loopy (dehydration isn't pretty), and by the end of the day we were coated in fine, bright oxidized dust - sore, and just plain tired of yard improvement. However, this next weekend we'll be back out there, ready to do battle with nature and entropy.

You Don't Need a Decoy, Leroy, Just Set Yourself Free...

Along the route that I go running (almost every weekday morning) there is a Killdeer who has its nest in the tall grass beside the road. Before coming to Kentucky I wasn't familiar with this bird, but it is supposedly well known for scrambling along the ground pretending to have a broken wing, so as to lead potential troublemakers away from its nest. Each morning I pad along to the spot where I know that my little friend will pop out of the grass and scoot ahead of me like an Indy pace car,weaving and zipping along. However, this morning I must have gotten up a little earlier than usual (or perhaps my ground-dwelling pal hit the snooze button on his alarm clock), because instead getting the regular escort, I caught my Killdeer on the edge of the grass and he just freaked out - feathers all poofed out, and a tremendous little racket of righteous indignation. It was like catching him in the bird-equivalent of being in his bathrobe & slippers with a cup of coffee, fetching the paper off the front porch. One angry bird. I initially felt bad for him, but, like I said over my shoulder as I trotted on: C'mon! Its not like you don't see me almost every day, eh?

Waffle's in the House, Y'all!

Give me some waffles, and its a party. Rebounded from Thursday's low-point with a Saturday morning trip to Waffle House - one of those icons that the rest of America turns to for 24-7 waffle-based solace (while, once again, we in New England don't have a clue - just like we don't understand White Castle). Nothing fancy, but oh-so-good indented batter-based yumminess! Now I'm flying back at normal cruising altitude, and the world seems right again. I know that a lot of us are waffle-centric - sooooo, write in and tell us how waffles shape your life. Are you a casual user, or a full-blown, Betty Ford Clinic, six-week-rehab type? What's topside? Maple syrup or fruit topping & whipped cream? Belgian, or thin and crispy? Inquiring minds want to know!

A little, dark cloud in my sky

Yesterday I went up to Louisville (which sounds like "Luvul" when the locals pronounce it) to do some job searching, and I gotta tell you that it turned out to be a downer - and I can't give you any particular reason as to why, but when I got back to my friend's place last night I was in a funk. A blue funk. And I really wanted to listen to Chet Baker Sings, but since it was on the ol' lap top... colour it "gone". Yeah, well, you get the picture. I don't know why it turned out to be such a crappy experience (well, Maru-chan did get dinged-up by a rock on I-65 - thank you Mr. Eighteen-Wheeler from Tennessee... ). It looks like a nice city and all. Maybe it was the hours spent sitting in a munincipal office filling out an endless application, only to be told afterwords that "... we don't know when we'll be hirin' anyone ..." (and the whole point of going to Louisville in the first place was because I was told that I had to go there in person to register and apply for work - no Internet applications allowed). Or maybe it was the weather, or it was just time for me to feel down for a change. Up to that point I had been having a pretty good job-hunting experience here in Kentucky (and, to be fair, I've been having a heck of a lot more luck finding leads than in Crashachusetts). I guess we can't always be up all the time, eh?

Until Pebbles Grow into Boulders Covered in Moss

Just thinking about rocks again...

Near Dell(th) Experience

Oh man, the Dell is in the I.C.U. - according to my tech-savy friend, the laptop has fried some vitals; he'll try to scrounge up some spare parts, and (hopefully) that will get my ailing mobile computing slab up and running, but no promises. Originally I bought the Dell, because a Veterinarian friend swore by them (said that the Dell in their animal clinic consistantly got clogged up with cat and dog hairs, was dropped from counters, and survived dozens of non-computer-friendly employees, and still operated like a champ). Maybe I have poor lap top karma (or maybe I shouldn't have lent my Dell to my dad - hmmm... that might explain why he recently returned it to me and bought his own lap top...). No use raging over burnt diodes.
Hang tough my flat silicon friend - help is on the way...

Rock on On!

A truck has just come by and dumped all this lava rock on my friend's driveway. They are going to put it around the house (like some sort of DMZ to keep the horde of encroaching weeds at bay). I asked the driver where do they get this stuff, anyhow? He didn't know.
Is there a volcanic island somewhere in the South Pacific where the locals mine their igneous rock and ship it to lawn centers around the world? And if so, aren't they chipping away at the very foundation of their society? (although, I suppose, lava is a
renewable resource, but only if your local volcano is active) It all seems slightly dodgy to me. Here we are talking about Third World debt relief, while we should be talking about sustainable lava rock removal. How many islands need to disappear in an orgy of self-destructive capitalism, before we step-in and do something about it? Now I'm looking at this lava rock like some sort of blood stone...
Yeah, well anyways, it is pretty light, so it shouldn't be too much of a hassle to shovel it off the driveway and onto a more convenient spot. I like to think that somewhere on Tonga right now a home owner has just gotten a delivery of crushed New England granite to put around the outside of their home (you know, to hide all that ugly red volcanic rock...).

Colding

My friends here in Kentucky enjoy watching the Weather Channel - and what is there not to love about a 24hr. station dedicated to all things weather-related? They have a morning show with three meteorologists who sit and chat about climatic changes, and then take turns going to the big projected map and showing high pressure systems colliding with low pressure ones (resulting in... weather). Now, television weather people tend to come across as overly genki, slightly apologetic prognosticators - so, we tend to forget that many of them are part of the earth science community (and, thus, scientists, not shamans). Rememeber, Socrates and Ben Franklin were meteorologists, too!
Which brings me to the fact that in the two (+) weeks I have been here, I have seen more extreme weather than in the past two years back in Boston (however , ironically, after having left home, they have been deluged by rain in biblical proportions - which leads me to believe that I am in fact a talisman of warding off catastrophic weather). Around here it has suddenly gotten chilly and big storm fronts sweep past hourly (supposedly there is some community up in Indiana who gets whacked by most of these systems) , but nothing really bad has happened yet. Personally, I am anxious about seeing my first tornado, but if indeed I have some sort of calming effect on the atmosphere, then perhaps the weather here could have been much, much worse... Or, at least that's what I like telling myself...

Tractor!

товарищ! In film school the last movie shown in my International Masterworks class (which had had its share of heavy European cinema, like Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice) was Aki Kaurismäki's Leningrad Cowboys Go America. Now, up to that point I had not had a lot of exposure to Finnish film, but what did we have to lose? In a nutshell: a Russian band takes the advice of their local kommisar to go to America (their musical qualities not being fully appreciated at home). Sporting elongated pointy shoes and hair, ill-fitting Warsaw Pact suits, and an amazing air of sangfroid, our heroes make the leap. So, packing their frozen (and assumedly dead) cousin, the group lands in New York, where they are immediately sent on a gig to play a wedding in Mexico; packed in a Cadillac with a coffin on the roof (with holes cut out for the deceased's hair, shoes and arm clutching his bass guitar in rigor). How can you not love a Finnish road movie?
A few years later, while browsing in a second-hand CD shop in Japan, I came across Leningrad Cowboys Go Space . The music can best be described as Soviet-themed rock-a-polka. Initially I thought these guys were like a Finnish-version of the Monkees - you know, a band artifically constructed to fit into a media product. Not so. They are the real deal, and they have come to play. So comrades, if you have neither watched nor heard our Finnish brothers, go forth and rectify this (you won't be sorry).

Code Blue!

"beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!"
My Dell Laptop has just flat-lined, and a message keeps popping up saying something about "Corrupt Files" - what the heck did I download? Sloth? Envy? Luckily my friend's place is like the Rampart Emergency of computer care, and he's Dr. Joe Early, putting the paddles to the defunct O.S. and booting up a new one - CLEAR! I hope it pulls through - hang in there Dell and stay away from the Light!

Bringing Paper Together

My red Swingline stapler has some competition...

My good friend Alex http://mountain-breeze.blogspot.com/ has just sent a picture of the future in upper-left-corner, paper-on-paper binding technology:

The Panda non-staple stapler (a.k.a. "StitchLock). This was originally brought to my attention by our office supply guru and technologist-in-the-field, Kit Ten http://fancywordsanddodobirds.blogspot.com/ . According to her report this device makes tiny perforations which are then sealed together using either:
A) nano-bots, wielding lasers to weld the paper at the sub-atomic level
Or
B) some sort of adhesive
(personally, I like the nano-bot idea)
It comes from Japan, so of course it is shaped like a Panda (I'm sure in the near-future it will be available in a veritable Noah's Ark of obscenely cute rotund animal shapes). Can't resist... ...must... have one !

Rain again, rain again

I woke up this morning intending to go running, but the crack of thunder put the kibbosh on that idea. Now it is raining cats and dogs, threatening to wash away the tons of sod and seed that my friends and I laboured to put down this past weekend (which might explain why the drainage ditch is thick with grass...). The lights flickered a few times with each loud boom, but we haven't lost power (yet). The locals tell me that this area of Kentucky has a lot of clay, so the water doesn't really soak in - it just pools - so, I'm looking at moving to higher ground if this keeps up. I wonder if my car has any amphib capability?

Which brings me to one of my favourite cinematic water-displacement scenes: Charleton Heston parting the Red Sea. I can't tell you how many times I wish I had that skill set...
And isn't it just the thing that nobody cut Moses any slack after he did that?! Human nature, eh?

Bureaucra(z)y

In my on-going search for employment it has become necessary to enlist the help of certain professionals who know how to traverse the corridors of power. Job hunting in the current business world is not unlike Odyssèus and his quest to get home - you're marooned on Kālypsō (the island of unemployment); it takes a long time (hopefully slightly less than ten years); you have to fight the Gorgon (Human Resources) who strikes fear in all who gaze upon it; and finally, after a lot of trouble, you get an audience with Penélopê (the Hiring Manager). Then you wreck bloody vengeance on all the other suitors. So, I have found my very own Eumaeus - a person who knows how to write magic job descriptions that grab bureaucrats and shake them like a triple-shot espresso mochachino. I feel like I am walking around with the 800 lb. gorilla - this new resume is going to kick down doors and take names (I dare not unleash it on just any company). And what will be the first thing I do when I get a job? Put my red Swingline stapler on my desk and soak up the envious stares of my new co-workers.

He fixes the cable?

If you read my profile you may have noticed that I have a weakness for hard-boiled detective fiction (usually set in California - the place where tough guy Séamas's seem to congrugate). If Philip Marlowe were to be recast as an aging, over-educated, not too ambitious SoCal surfer dude (who's life seems to center on white russians and bowling) you'd get The Big Lebowski. Among my movie-watching friends there is great debate about where this film stands in the pantheon of Cohen Brothers' cinema - mainly they argue that it is okay, but not their best work; I vociferously counter that it is brilliant (and proceed to belittle their obviously pitiful lack of cinematic skills).) When the porn king, Jackie Treehorn, sends his strongarm boys to shake down The Dude (mistaking him for the other Lebowski - the millionaire), they don't urinate on his rug - they micturate. And that rug really tied the room together - prompting The Dude to face his richer alter-ego, the other Jeffrey Lebowski, looking for suitable compensation. Leading to more rug trouble. Throw in the highly volitile & unstable Walter Sobchak, some "nihilist" Germans (Uli, Franz and Dieter - and Uli's unnamed girlfirend, Aimee Mann, who I once met in a Brookline liquor store in the early 90s, and I had a serious crush on when I was 16... but I digress), the sexually deviant arch-nemesis bowler, Jesus Quintana - plus The Dude's wonderfully beat-up Ford
- and you have a winner. Oh, and Steve Buscemi ("Donny, you're out of your element!") dies... again.

Colour My World Anime

When I lived in Ushiku it was a little isolated - which was good, because it forced me to have to jump into the language and culture (if I had lived in a large metropolis, I may not have had the motivation to study as hard). One way to immerse myself in the popular culture was to watch T.V. Of course I watched NHK to get all the proper, formal Japanese, but in order to learn more about the popular zeitgeist I watched the defining animation shows (which seem to be from either the post-war '50s era, or the '70s, but have continued on to the present day). On Sunday nights Fuji Television would show Sazae-san ( サザエさん ) and Chibi Maruko-chan ( ちびまる子ちゃん ), both immensely popular anime which came from even more popular comics. What I liked the best about Chibi was the changing theme song after each episode (Japanese television anime regularly add new ending songs). What better way to learn Japanese then to sing along with Chibi? After these, though, my absolute favourite animation came on: Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari Kōen Mae Hashutsujo ( こちら葛飾区亀有公園前派出所 ) or: "This Is the Police Station in Front of Kameari Park in Katsushika Ward". Whew! I just called it Ryō-san after the main character, Ryōtsu Kankichi ( 両津勘吉 ); a salt-of-the-earth policeman who is the definitive stereotypical otaku, sarariman and big-fish-in-a-small-pond kind of guy (shitamachi). Gruff, bluff, lazy, but big-hearted and crazy about pachinko, video games, models, toys, etc. Check out the website: http://www.jkochikame.com/
Ryō-san spent much of his time in pursuit of money-making schemes (which either failed spectacularly, or he used his new-found wealth on pachinko, ramen, toys, etc.). It is no longer on T.V. but the manga is still published. I found that by watching these shows, not only did I pick up some intersting words and slang, but saw how the Japanese saw themselves. It is like the Simpsons - the culture references and nuances are what make it so funny and familiar to those who understand them. So, Sazae-san, Chibi, and Ryō-san all did their part to help educate & entertain me.

The Brent-meister General

"Does a struggling salesman start turning up on a bicycle? No, he turns up in a newer car - perception, yeah? They got to trust me - I’m taking these guys into battle, yeah? And I’m doing my own stapling."

Stormin' The Mid-West

Last night I was awoken by the sounds of strong wind and thunder. The Ohio River Valley is a conduit for crazy-go-nuts weather (cyclones, hail as-big-as-your-head, etc.) and my friends have a house that was constructed specifically to withstand an F4 tornado (the place is built like a bunker; thick concrete walls, reinforced roof - real solid). Yet, regardless, when the lightning hit, and the thunder followed, it was like artillery coming down on us - I have never experienced such an intense electrical storm (I lived in Honduras and saw some crazy weather, but nothing like this). This morning the lightning was so bright and it hit so close to the house that I had to seriously consider ducking under the breakfast table (although my hosts didn't seem too fazed by it). The regular lightning that we have back home is some sort of diluted variety - like someone hit the Dim switch on our stuff. After this I now definitely don't want to see a tornado, but my friends feel confident that we might get one while I'm here. Yippee. I had to go out and make sure that Maru-chan was still here, and not somewhere, say, like West Virginia, or a smoking hole in the driveway. When I was a kid there were all those Irwin Allen disaster flicks always on the UHF channels, so I have a healthy respect for killer bees, killer storms, and killer high-rise towering infernoes (geeez... what kind of life do you suppose Mr. Allen had, anyways?). When I lived in Japan we were always under the threat of earthquakes, tsunamis, land slides and the occasional North Korean Taepodong missle. In New England we get hurricanes, blizzards and Nor'Easters (which are big storms with lots-o-wind & rain/snow). Hmmm... so, I guess we all live in some sort of imminent danger from some sort of natural catastrophe (killer bee or otherwise). Stay safe out there people, stay safe!

Just a little more

If your family was into music, then most likely you might have picked up some of your tastes from them. Its like some sort of audio second-hand smoke. My dad was into classical and jazz. Something clicked, so now I like classical and jazz. My mom was into Neil Diamond. And, no, I don't like Neil Diamond, but I can still remember the lyrics to most of his songs (I do a pretty spot-on impersonation of him too). When I lived in Germany my Euro friends were into Bau Haus and Siouxsie and the Banshees (oh, and the Thrill Kill Cult, too). But now, somehow, I'm into Frank, but with no visible line of connection. I can't stand My Way or New York, New York. I like the stuff from the 50s and 60s - the music with sadness. The man was flawed, but he could sing. No One Cares is one of my favourite albums. I listen to it when I'm down, or the weather is crummy. Give it a whirl, maybe you'll like it, too. If you listen closely on the tracks you can hear Frank cough, or breath in. It's a very human album.

In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning

Today it is grey and raining. Yesterday was stormy and blustery. Perfect weather for Billie Holiday and melancholy Frank (as opposed to jaunty Frank). And we'll add Lena Horne, too (a special request from the Coast).

That Ol' Devil Called Love
Time to go out and get some coffee I think...