nothrything
I got my 30-nights-stay "thank you" letter from the hotel last night; one entire month of my 2005 was spent at this hotel. They gave me three-thousand Taiwan dollars worth of free food or beer or whatever. Yeah, just what I need: "free" beer. For the first time on this trip, I'm simply sitting in my room doing nothing. So I decided I'd try and at least get one proper entry done before my regulars bail on me.
I did write this week, despite what the calendar shows. I started and never finished an entry a day, on average. As proof (for some reason), here's a potpourri of unfinished stuff from this past week, at least it's better than nothing:
3000 miles into the trip and I’ve exhausted the visual media I borrowed from the internet for the flight. That internet, he’s a great guy, loaned me the Family Guy movie and Fox screener of the O.C.’s season-opener for the flight. With both consumed and enjoyed, I’m at the point where I type for a bit and listen to music, at least, until I get tired of typing and decide to nap. On a plus note, I’m listening to this extremely 60s-tinged Field Music album, which is quite enjoyable. Reminding me a bit of the Shins, and strangely like a less-prog Yes at times, I think; damn fine, whoever they sound like.
I already miss my wife, now-lonely as I fly and future-lonely over the prospect of two other long-distance trips before the year’s out: Shanghai in October and Bangalore in December. In some way, I hope both trips materialize, as I’ve never been to either place – and am particularly interested in seeing India. I suppose it’s better to get the traveling out of the way before Lil’ Chino comes, since I doubt I’ll want to be away for very long afterward. Meaning this year is my boon year for travel, as well as my travel swansong of sorts.
A shorter one:
Been no time to write y'all, no time.
Throat is scratchy from beer and cigarettes and belting out exaggerated versions of such karaoke standards as "House of the Rising Sun," "Hotel California," "Friends in Low Places," and "The Final Countdown."
An ambitious one with no hope of being completed:
Taiwan, the text-based adventure game version.
You are standing in the lobby of an opulent hotel. All around you, people in tuxedos are waiting to serve you, and all flat surfaces are made of marble. A man is happily polishing anything brass. To your left is the concierge desk. To your right, a staircase. In front of you, a set of large glass doors, and two immaculately dressed doorman who are eagerly awaiting the opportunity open them for you.
>left
You are standing at the foot of a staircase which is, of course, made entirely of marble. The staircase winds around and around upward and out of sight. Above you, hear can hear the faint strains of piano and laughter.
>climb staircase
You begin up the winding stair. As you crest the top, ahead of you is a dimly lit open room. It's hard to see from here, but it appears to be a bar, and you can now better make out the sound of clinking glass and conversation.
>shit
You can't shit here.
>damn
There is no one here to damn.
>go to bar
You walk toward the BAR. The floor opens up to your right, looking down on the lobby where you stood moments below, a large crystal chandelier hangs from the ceiling. As you come to the entrance of the bar, you can now make out couples hunched over drinks and shelves of bottles on the wall. There is a sign at the entrance to the bar.
>read sign
"Henry's Bar, Sherwood Hotel, Taipei."
>eat sign
You cannot eat the sign.
>make knuckle-babies.
Does not compute.
>enter bar
You walk inside. The friendly staff immediately recognizes you for the VIP pimp you are, and ushers you to a seat at the large marble bar.
>check pockets
You rifle through your POCKETS. You find a wallet with several thousand dollars of local currency, a room key, and a cellphone.
And, I have no earthly idea what this one is or when this week I wrote it - but it was in my drafts folder and made me laugh so hard when reading it, I had to post it:
World population growth rate in light of human and technological development making life much safer than living in caves and dealing with your food not wanting to die so you can eat.
Bought a fake watch this time in Taipei. Lots of people do it, and I guess I caved to the pressure. Somehow, I either lost or forgot to bring my watch on this trip. I never realized how much I looked at the thing until it wasn't on my wrist all the time. It's a fake TAG, which the fake-watch man told me retails for like $2500 if it's real; I paid $70. At least I got a new watch, even if it does scream "pompus brand-whore" quietly from my undeserving wrist.
What an ugly entry. Goodnight.
sleep deprivation
Sounds Familiar turns two, I apparently take a week off.
Lack of sleep, and no lack of activity during that lack of sleep, makes this the least blogged week ever.
Stay tuned.
Dave out.
tied to the mast
Hey folks! Check it out!
The 10/12Z notations are dates slash times. If you look, between 12 Zulu on September 10th and 12 Zulu on September 11th, typhoon Khunan will grace Taiwan with its presence. Doing the Zulu-to-local conversion (providing my math is right, I never was good with time), that puts this thing in Taiwan sometime between 8pm Saturday and 8pm Sunday. My flight is due to arrive in Taipei at 8:15pm Saturday night. It's almost like Khunan and I got together and planned it!
Swirling red wine in a glass at Wayne's place... midnight on the eve of my departure. Too much wine, really... stubborn fingers are ugly on the keyboard.
Goodnight, fare-me-well. Until next week, in Taiwan. Goodnight.
grammar is hard
A productive Wednesday for me, how about y'all? Hit the bermudagrass with round-two of the Turflon today. Did it while at home for my lunch break, since I had the evening booked with getting a haircut, paying bills, and mowing the lawn. Check and check, I'm firm on the path to being ready for my flight to Taiwan Friday morning.
I know this thing really isn't a "music blog," or anything... so I'd guess that most folks who read this simply skip over my frequent musical musings. That's cool with me, really. I'm just trying to give you a heads-up, I'm about to talk a little bit about music right now.
As 2005 draws to a close, my mind moves toward Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and that favorite annual staple of all music fans: the year-end "Best Of" lists. As much as I love hopping around the web for all the 'zine and personal best-ofs, I enjoy putting together my own list more. This year's list will be sounds familiar's third annual Best Of list, such and accomplishment. And this year, I went about it a little different. The two years prior, I simply sat around sometime in December and cast my mind back over the musical landscape that made up the year. It's often tough to remember what had me singing and smiling ten months earlier... but I think I've done a fair job at it so far. This year, thanks to the beauty of WordPress's "draft" feature, I've been keeping a running "candidate for the list" list (WordPress's? WordPress'?). As an album becomes endeared to me throughout the year, I jot it down in my draft entry. The way I envision it, I'll go back and sample each candidate album as I sit down to write the list... heck, I may even do a "Top 15" this year since I may have some help remembering, what with the draft and my use of audioscrobbler (or whatever it's called now). Draft entries are cool for all sorts of reasons, take for example my running draft: "If I die, please post this." How cool would it be to "pen" one final entry from the grave. Mwuh-ah-ah-ah!!
I likely won't write Friday, and this hardly counts as writing today. So... goodnight.
output enabling
Wednesday already, wow. Two more days and I'm off to Taiwan [cut to stock footage: Dave wants to go, but also doesn't want to go]. Sitting at home and having a beer after a strange day of "now I'm a manager" realizations at work... where I'm finally realizing I have to "let go" of the stuff I used to covet and start focusing on more intangible things. For someone that craves the little gold stars on the top of good work, it's a tough transition. Scary, actually, when your goals shift from a personal-output-based model to an output-you-enabled one. I take heart, though, that I at least "get" that, and that I'm cognizant enough to recognize and do my best to address it.
So yeah, I'm late to the Cloud Room party... dunno what happened there - guess you can't be first to every party. Another one of the out-of-the-bowels-of-NYC wunderkind, their debut single is impossible to hate... seriously, listen to it try to think nasty thoughts about it. Put it on your headphones and think about punching it in the face, see how impossible it is. Give it a spin and try and make a disparaging remark about its mother, you won't be able to; the dang thing is disarming. I say we give this track to the Army, have them aim humongous loudspeakers at Al Qaeda training camps, and play it over and over again. Then, rather than ascribe to extremist Muslim theology, prospective terrorists will instead clasp hands and dance around euphorically in a circle, smiling ear-to-ear while singing "... we're goin' downtown, take the bus there, pay the bus fare!!..." in broken English. It's OK terrorists; it's OK that your body wants to bounce around in its seat, OK that you "duh-duh-duh" along with the bassline, it really is OK - Allah said so, he digs the Cloud Room too - I saw him at the show at CBGB last week... he really knows how to let his turban down.
This weekend, I was finally able to see Sharaun's pooch. Wow, that sounds massively dirty... but I assure you it's much more academic than that. What I mean is, I can now see the beginnings of Lil' Chino's expanding 9-month lease. To me, this is huge; this is what I've been waiting for - even more validation than the indisputable ultrasound images we got weeks ago. Her growing belly is the physical evidence of progress that I've been craving! It puts my mind at ease, and makes me tingle with a heady mixture of anticipation and pride. It really is impossible I explain, I think, what a brick-wall realization it is. Lil' Chino is more than halfway here... 55% here, to be exact. Thinking about February, it still seems interminably far away... but more than ever I'm realizing it'll be on us in a flash. I guess I won't even fully understand it until it happens, 5-months and counting in some semi-disconnected state of shock and no sign of the fog lifting in time. Bring it on, Lil' Chino, bring it on.
Bedtime. Goodnight.
nuggetless
Happy long weekend people... hope it was enjoyable for you. We had a great time, and made sure to temper any "word" with plenty of do-nothing relaxation. Looking forward to another short week now, leaving early Friday morning for Taiwan. I'm excited, although I haven't really prepared for the presentation I'm giving... I guess it'll be another last-minute cram thing - at least I'm used to it. Bring it on.
Gold mining this weekend was a bust, but a fun bust. Camping was awesome, the weather was great and there weren't many others out there so we had some privacy. I think everyone enjoyed themselves. There's a certain draw to car-camping... being able to throw all the amenities in the truck and drive right to your spot. We had the big tent, the air mattress, camp-chairs, soap, etc. You get the good food, the coolers full of beer, all the luxuries of home. I brought my pipe, wore my ridiculous (but dearly beloved) crushable felt cowboy hat, and spat sunflowers seeds while dozing under the sun. As for the mining, after some trial and error, the pump and motor worked perfectly - pumping large volumes of water. I, however, had chosen to leave my grandfather's true sluice at home, since it was nearly 30ft long and somewhat cumbersome being made of heavy tin. I opted, instead, to bring a small plastic store-bought sluice which I knew would likely be too small for the volume of water moved by the pump. I was right as, even on the lowest throttle setting, there was too much water on the sluice, and it washed away everything you dumped on the sluice. For the sluice I brought, we'd have been better off just bucketing the water ourselves. So, although Pat and I were particularly happy with the pump assembly working, in the end we resorted to simply panning on the shore. Panning is fun, it's got the same sort of tranquil attraction that fishing does. If we decide to do it again, I'll bring the full sluice and set it up right... it's a big operation. For some action-shots with the equipment, you can browse through Ben's gallery.
What do you guys think about Kanye's little ad-lib on the NBC benefit show for Katrina victims? If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can watch it here. Watching the video, it looks to me like Kanye had likely thought about what he wanted to say before he got up there, but his nervousness in actually going through with it was evident. It looked to me like he was fumbling at first, seemingly forcing out the words. After he got rolling and picked up a little steam, he was fine (although it still wasn't the most polished speech). The plainfaced delivery of "George Bush doesn't care about black people," was pretty stinging. For me, simplifying the situation to black vs. white is shortsighted and dangerous - I'd say it's more poor vs. rich; an issue of class, not race. If you order an evacuation of a city, it somewhat stands to reason that that city's poorer and less fortunate will likely be the least able to leave. With perhaps no money to travel or stay somewhere else, and perhaps nowhere else to go - it's conceivable that those who struggle with poverty would simply not have the ways or means to get out of harm's way. I suppose any administration would expect a good deal of criticisms in the aftermath of a national disaster - some of which may be legitimate gripes, others just using the situation to their advantage. Just seems to me that this country should have some sort of infrastructure in place to be able to respond to worst-case situations like this. Whatever; I could be wrong, too.
Installed the latest Gallery2 release candidate last night, and am very pleased. The install process is 100 times better and easier than the previous 1.x versions. The administrative features look simplified and more organized too - and things just seem to "work" more than they did in the previous versions. Now that things are chugging nicely, and the program isn't so tough to use and optimize - I'm hoping to utilize it for all my upcoming photo uploads. I gave up using the 1.x versions because there was just so much heavy lifting involved. Oh, the old version worked, and looked pretty dang slick, but I didn't have the patience to take the time and put in the effort to use it right. So, I gave up posting images to the web really... just didn't do it. We'll see what happens.
Fall is in the air folks, it really is. Did I say that already? I know it because, today, I bought the first ingredients in the makings for Halloween 2005. Oh man, I'm pumped. Unlike last year, there are no major new purchases, really, just some more black lights (you can never have enough black lights). Like last year, there will be a new "major" prop addition - this year's being a variation on this theme. (I plan on modding some of the setup, maybe making a different looking coffin.) Ahhh... Halloween... Wal Mart has its candy aisle up already, and the Halloween store is moving into the outlet mall this week. I took a look at my three-year-old gravestones and graveyard fence today, and decided it's time to make a new fence and touch up the old tombstones as well as fab some brand new ones. Now I just have to get off my butt and actually do some stuff.
'Night.
look timmy, a mountain! do you see the mountain?!
I don't even know if this entry makes sense... I'm delerious-tired.
Skirting Portland means a freakin' maze of intertwined highways, crawling along on half of them with your foot on the brake. I'm pretty dang tired, 4am wake-up this morning and not much rest on the flight up. All-day meeting requiring my attention didn't help. Now I'm back in the aeropuerto waiting for my "on time" flight to get here on time. I just want a nap, I'm tired.
The blog spam has been "shock and awe" style lately, over 100 items a day. I must say, though, WordPress stops nearly every single piece - every so often, a single piece gets through and I have to manually delete it. Most of the spam is for online hold'em, with viagra and phentermine running a close second. I tell you what, people must buy a whole heck of a lot of viagra and phentermine online... something's making the marketing worth it.
The plane home was the flight from Hell. To my left, a young man, perhaps 21 or 22. Across the aisle to my right, a young mother with two young children, perhaps 3 and 4. I would soon come to find out that these two seemingly normal folks were, indeed, two of the most surreal people I could've possibly run into when I all I wanted to do was grab a nap on the way home.
The young man was a devout Seventh Day Adventist, he told me, out of the blue. He was also a "plane talker." You know, those people who, for whatever reason, feel like they have to talk to you every second of the flight. He regaled me from the moment he sat down. "So, what about gas prices?" "Can you believe this hurricane?" He went on to tell me that he was coming home from college, to visit his folks for a while. He was double-majoring in Theology and Fitness Management, with a minor in Piano. He said he didn't want to be "tied down" to one job. Yeah, because the market's wide-open for Christian school PE teachers who play piano. Obviously intelligent by some of his comments, his unfortunately baritone, droning, and slow, stinted speech made him sound like the vulture from the cartoons: "Duhhh, which we did he go, George? Which way did he go?"
The woman with the kids was worse. Her voice went to eleven. She was a full two decibels louder than anyone else on the plane, and she was one of those people who is her kids' best friend. "Get ready Jessie, we're about to pull out on the runway! We're about to go fast! Hang on!! Are you ready to go fast?! Get ready, we're about to go. Watch the wheels, here we go!" "Look at the clouds! Do you see the clouds? Sit still, do you feel those bumps? That's called 'turbulence.' Feel it? Look at the mountains! Can you see the wing? Isn't this fun?!" Oh. My. God. This woman never shut up, never took a breath, every annoying pointless bit of childlike banter seemingly screamed through a megaphone. This back and forth went on for the entire flight, her children talking as loud as her - following her example.
At one point, while feigning sleep to avoid dealing with it all - I realized how insane the stereo picture between my two ears was. Babbling loud mom on my right, and babbling spiritual Adventist on my left. That's when it hit me, no one would ever believe this - I was obligated to record it to prove my story. So, I snuck out my cellphone and, against FAA regulations, began recording as the two loonies' ranting crescendoed. And here, folks, I present the audio proof of my flight from Hades, complete with my own transcripts lest you have a hard time understanding what's going on. Keep in mind, I sat my phone on my lap while recording this - so this is the level I would hear if my ears were on my hips... helps to establish the levels we're dealing with.
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Seriously, listen to this guy ramble (with absolutely no response from me, completely unsolicited):
... But umm... yeah... I have a hard time... ahh... being able to listen to... something that just, is the same four chords forty times, literally forty times in a song. It's like, man do something else. This is an insult to human intelligence to say, that, it'd be like saying - and they say it the same way to - for me, y'know, repetition is OK but, they [add it?] a different way.. with your innuendo, and even when you're talking you don't talk like that. Over and over again, y'know, just talk in a monotonic way [Howdy Doody?] and all that. So, I don't know, I think... some... I mean repetition is an essential element of music, but it's not... it... uhh.. it has to be done right; or I mean it has to be done in a real... it needs to be done with thought, as well as emotion. All the songs really are too... just... uhh... what; most everyone's been to church and heard hymns played in a lifeless way, y'know, and so I can see different extremes to somewhere where all their years - it's, umm, there's all, it's all emotion but no.. [??] y'know. And then you have... thought but no feeling, so. ... Different songs are gonna have different amplitudes and different elements... It's so amazing because it's a holistic language. It's, umm, it effects the body and the mind and the spirit, y'know, it effects every facet, y'know.
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Here's a good idea of the stereo effect I was getting.. with the Monotone Saint on one side and Cheerleader Mom on the other. There's something about the "animal kingdom" in there... I swear. What a flight.
I feel like I wrote this thing so fast, I'm sure it's full of typos - and I'm not going back to proofread.
Goodnight.
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