Todd Stadler's blog

[untitled #404]

The encroachment at Timber Press continues. I have now scavenged the parts to form a hanging file folder system. This is less exciting of itself than the fact that my desk is now less covered in paper. I also have a pen holder. In short, I am more organized. And a more organized person is harder to get rid of, right? Right? Well, if not, at least I'm more organized. I can put that on my resume or something.

[untitled #403]

Another thing I've been walking by a lot on the way to work is the Fox Tower cinema. And every time, I notice the poster for My Big Fat Greek Wedding. That poster bothers me. In place of the two e's in "Greek", there are two Greek sigmas. Which are, of course, the equivalent of s's in English. So you have this movie that sells itself for being an ethnic comedy, and yet they don't worry that, to a reasonably literate person of said ethnicity, the movie is called "My Big Fat Grssk Wedding". I don't know. I think I'll find another route to work.

[untitled #402]

While walking through the South Park Blocks on my way to work, I noticed that the roses smelled particularly redolent. I was reminded very much of a Sesame Street scratch 'n' sniff book I had as a child. Which is odd. It's like eating cherries that taste just like cherry Jolly Ranchers.

[untitled #401]

There is a wild blackberry bush that grows on the sidewalk down my street. Every day, as I walk by it, I've been watching the berries ripen. Then all the ripe ones disappeared. But today I found some more good ones, and they were so sweet. It's very odd to me that there are plants out there just giving up food right in the middle of the city. And it's not poisonous or anything. It seems communist or something.

[untitled #400]

I love my webhosting company. There I was at one in the morning, having forgotten my password for mySQL. What to do? Why, call up tech support, of course! And the bonus: phone calls at that hour are free on my cell phone! Whee! There are few companies in the world that take your calls at that hour, much less competently.

[untitled #399]

While I rank in the top ten sites that Google returns for some rather prurient searches, I am nowhere near as proud of that as I am for ranking (as of this writing) as number one for the search "clowns dancing with monkeys". Wow. Thank you, referral logs!

[untitled #398]

My subtle encroachment on the people of Timber Press continues. Although I remain a temporary employee or contractor or somesuch, I have now attained the following accoutrements of a permanent employee: own computer (Power Mac 9600, so it's really half a computer, crawl crawl) own desk (again, the monitor and computer footprint obliterate most of my space), own e-mail address (although I am not yet on the muckety-mucks "all" lists yet), and now my own inbox. Now if I could just con someone into giving me benefits...

[untitled #397]

As my usual deodorant was still packed from this weekend's trip to Port Angeles, WA, I found myself wearing the same deodorant as I last used when I traveled to Europe, as well as one of the shirts I wore on that trip. As such, my work is continually interrupted by pleasant memories of Prague or Barcelona. Which is fine, as it's Monday.

the barbituate of the masses

But when life gets you down, there's always TV to take your mind off things!

If you have the time, may I recommend PAX's breakout show, Supermarket Sweep?

What better way is there to restore confidence in a market shaken by infectious greed than by celebrating that most American of pastimes - stacking as many hams and gallons of olive oil in your shopping cart as quickly as possible?

And the show's web site also has a really helpful shopping list that I use when I go out to the grocery store. Don't forget the frozen beans and prepared salads! I just want to know why there's no checkboxes for "obscenely large quantities of hams and cheeses".

Of course, if maniacal consumerism isn't your cup of tea and you don't enjoy ogling haggled suburban housewives in sweatshirts, there's always congenial host David "Help my career is over" Ruprecht to put a scripted laugh into your life. You probably remember David as the radio voice in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan or as Thurston Howell IV in "The Harlem Globe Trotters on Gilligan's Island".

But for those who find it difficult to squeeze in an entire 22 minutes of blatant product advertising plus commercials, you can always read TV on the Internet!

Like, for instance, this article I found at CNN.com (motto: "where two of the three initials are increasingly incorrect") in which two minds discuss the relevance of Britney Spears et al.

Thrill to the hard-hitting analysis!

TOURE: Like last night, right, we're sitting there thinking, how can we say Britney is over? That "Slave For You" piece came on from MTV last year with the snake.

NEVILLE: That's hot.

Marvel at the deft social commentary!

NEVILLE: Pink, that's my girl.

TOURE: Because she's black, right?

NEVILLE: I think Pink is...

TOURE: She is one of those white girls who is kind of black. I think so.

And discover the secret behind Justin Timberlake's success!

NEVILLE: He's from 'N Sync.

TOURE: Just to be clear, he's from Memphis, Tennessee. He has got that soul in him. He's been eating ribs all his life. He talks about his grandmother's peach cobbler that he loves.

You can even learn about the Next Big Thing you can't help but love. It's a lovable scamp who, according to "Toure" ... well, let's let him say it in his own words:

TOURE: This guy is from Atlanta. He made a reported 36 songs on $10,000 of equipment in his bedroom. It's total low-fi.

Which may be six times as much per song as Nirvana spent on their debut album, but hey. "Low-fi" is subject to inflation, too, I suppose.

But I don't want to end this article on a down note, so I join "Toure" and Arthel Neville in saying

NEVILLE: I say, go, Janet.

TOURE: How about go, Justin?

Thank you, good night.

living in amerika

Let's play a game. Pretend that you are brought in by a Congressional committee to recommend a solution to the rampant problem of videocassette piracy.

While police are able to break up a few of the larger piracy rackets, the problem is that there are simply too many people copying videocassettes for the cops to stop them all. What should be done?

If you answered, "Vigilantism! Make it legal for employees of the movie studios to break in to wherever the illegal copies are being made and destroy the copying equipment, furthermore making it difficult for those allegedly engaged in piracy to recoup any (accidental) losses incurred as a result of this sabotage", then take a deep breath, and meet Senator Howard Berman.

Mr. Berman is upset at the fact that the record companies (all five of them) are completely incapable of making money now that peer-to-peer applications have proliferated (think of them as the mammals to the record companies' dinosaurs).

And as a U.S. Senator, Mr. Berman knows that all those millions of stupid laws that already exist can't possibly stem this tide of illegal behavior - not even if we tried to enforce them!

Furthermore, as a Democrat, Mr. Berman knows that big business always succeeds where government fails, and preventing illegal behavior is no exception! That's why he wants to make it legal for the music industry to hack into your computer and stop you from doing anything illegal. We can trust them, since they obviously care about the customers.

And, of course, if the companies accidentally delete something that you own legally, or otherwise mess things up, whoops! After you jump through the correct procedural hoops and prove that the damage done was over $250, justice is served!

Every day, I get more and more cynical, and more and more convinced it's the most logical reaction I can have to all this crap.

(Many links initially found on Tom Tomorrow's blog, he of This Modern World fame.)

[untitled #396]

Oh, I know, you read the Onion like everyone else. But their TV listings always make me laugh out loud, if only because they are mercifully short. Thus did I snicker at the Sci-Fi channel listing for "Movie: The Series". And, due to many wasted summer mornings watching Bob Barker go on and on, I truly understood the Game Show channel listings for "Ghoulish Spectres Of Souls Long Dead Guess How Much Turtle Wax Costs" and "Stick-Like Microphones With The Little Foam Ball On Top". As they say, how true, how true.

[untitled #395]

Every so often, reading the news (Plastic, Salon, The New York Times, or even CNN) makes me think we should just scrap America as it is and start over. Sometimes doing that can really help you to come up with some really great ideas.

[untitled #394]

Hey, look! extreme drought and severe market turmoil (in addition to the recession and all), all following a period of seemingly endless prosperity and general hedonistic stupidity. Gee, is it the 1930s again? I hope so, because I want to be part of The Other Greatest Generation. I also want to bore my spoiled grandkids to tears about how I survived this era. Yay!

[untitled #393]

Maybe we need some kind of Martin Luther of the technology world. Someone who will come along and lead a revolt against the greedy, evil leaders that preach fear and death outside of their one and only way. Maybe he can e-mail a document called Theses 95 to the Church at Redmond, among others. Except now it would be called Theses XP or whatever. I'm sure this has been thought of before.

[untitled #392]

You know you're reading an old computer manual when you come across the text "Netscape Navigator is the Web's most popular browser" (from The Allaire ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit, which I'm reading for work).

dream on

I recently had a weird dream. Lacking any other stories to tell you, I will regale you with tales from my somnambulant synapses.

I found myself in a crowded park near a travelling carnival. Hundreds of children were milling about without any parental supervision.

I should probably mention that the whole dream seems to have been "filmed" by a member of the 70s psychadelic school. Colors were odd, often washed out, and the whole dream had a grainy feel to it. The camera was somewhat unsteady, with unexplained quick zooms or pans to draw attention to various points.

Man, I'm glad I mentioned that. Maybe I dreamed I was watching a bad movie.

Anyhow, all the children were gorging themselves on meat, apparently given to them for free by the carnival people. They were making an absolute mess of the rotary barbeque, onto which they kept throwing huge slabs of meat.

I knew that something sinister was afoot, because nobody feeds that many children that much meat without some ulterior motive. It's a scientific fact. But I played it cool so I could get to the bottom of the plot.

Suddenly, I saw a white tiger on a chain. He roared at the children, which was obviously tiger-speak for "I want to eat them now", but he was led away by a man who I think was sporting a top hat and a curly moustache - which is evil no matter how you slice it. The man didn't want the children to see the tiger and thus realize they were being fattened so they could be eaten. But I knew better.

Somehow my Oregon world seeped into this dreamscape and I found myself talking to a couple of vegetarian children, who were not gorging themselves on meat. No, they were eating from yellow bags that contained "vegetarian snacks". When I read the ingredients list, it said "peas, a carrot, and 98% meat". Even the vegetarians had been duped!

I was then escorted into a school cafeteria (or was it a cafetorium?) adjacent to the circus grounds, which was being used by the circus folk as a giant feeding area.

And then I had dream deja vu. I knew that I had been here before, or maybe even had this dream before. Mind you, I'm not sure I had actually had this dream before, but in the dream, I had dreamed something like this before. Or something. Dreams can be like that.

I became very paranoid. I stopped talking around the carnival people. When I did talk, I didn't move my lips, so they couldn't be read by unseen sinister types. All very clever, but I still entered the building and ate the food they gave me, which wasn't meat, but pancakes.

You might think that it would be stupid to eat food from obviously evil carnival folk, but, much as I would in real life, I said to myself, "hey, free meal."

They were playing very loud music in the cafeteria to keep us kids from talking to each other. After all, talking is not eating.

And here is the part that made me chuckle when I woke up from this dream: the song that they were playing was Duran Duran's "Skin Trade" (RealAudio format).

I mean, talk about telegraphing your punches.

comix redux

In the small chunk of the universe that is my world, in the relatively large subchunk that deals with reading the comics, there is something strange going on.

First off, I laughed at a Ziggy cartoon. Not just any old tepid, up-with-people Ziggy cartoon, mind you. This cartoon.

I'm sure that I will have my detractors. The masses will say "Todd's gone soft!" and whisper among themselves. And yet I assert that this Ziggy cartoon is funny.

Okay, the intended gag doesn't measure up to the sublime humor of Get Fuzzy. But it still makes me giggle.

His car is making funny noises, and it's a clown. That's mildly surreal for Ziggy. I don't know, maybe my expectations are just so low for this Tom Wilson (and "Tom II") cartoon.

But what is causing me to giggle (or at least breathe irregularly) to this very moment is the drawing of that clown. Go look at it again! I assert that that is the most perfect clown drawing, ever.

Look at him! He's so serene! His smile is more that of a placid monk than some grotesque circus actor. And he's just happily floating there in the car's innards. Before, he was under the hood, but now he has happily risen up to show everyone how happy he is. He may be corpulent, his hat may dwarf his misshapen head, and he may be wearing the most ridiculous yellow ruffled thing I've ever seen, but he's so calm about it.

Fine, you think I'm crazy, and that's okay. But I'm telling you that this is a watershed Ziggy comic.

But if you can't understand that cartoon, then there is no way that you will grok yesterday's Family Circus. For in that cartoon, which involves a very dumb gag in which Dolly once again mispronounces something (there's only so many times you can laff at a learning disability), you can plainly see ...

Zippy the Pinhead's head!! There, on top of one of the totem poles!

Do you know what consternation this caused me when I was reading the comics in bed last night, ready to drift off to sleep?

Oh, fine, it actually didn't constern me much at all. Because I know, deep down, that Bil Keane is pretty darned hip.

After all, his own web site features a large number of parodies of his strip, some of which aren't so flattering or on the same level as Family Circus.

Heck, there's even an extensive collection of Zippy the Pinhead cartoons that feature a guest appearance by Bil Keane. So I guess the two know each other and are good friends.

Which might seem disappointing, in that it makes yesterday's Zippy sighting less edgy.

But when I think about it, if Bil Keane and (Zippy artist) Bill Griffith can be friends, then I know that the universe is a strange and wonderful place, and we can, in fact, all get along.

And really, isn't that what the internet is all about?

why wasn't it called vanilla ice?

I had a Vanilla Coke (warning: annoying music) recently, after hearing all the hub and the bub.

Mind you, I've been drinking vanilla Cokes since back in the day, served by my local quasi-50's-esque hamburger joint.

And I must say that those concoctions were better than the bottled version I had, if only because 1) they were imbued with more love than a robot bottler can give, 2) I was such a naive child - I didn't even know that carbohydrates were or were not bad for me! - that I didn't know any better, and 3) I am now a naive adult who thinks everything was better when I was a kid.

Ah, well. What interesting factoids can be gleaned from this experience?

Well, looking at the ingredients on the Vanilla Coke bottle, I noticed that they weren't much different from those on a regular (aka "Classic") Coke bottle: carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, and caffeine.

The only difference was that in Vanilla Coke, "natural flavors" comes before "phosphoric acid". Which means that whatever substance they put in there for realisticky vanilla-like flavorine, it tipped the delicate acid/flavor balance. And none too soon, I say.

But I found myself wondering why soda companies like Coke add caffeine. Oh, sure, it seems obvious that they do it for the buzz that kids like and college students require. But they can't really say that.

After all, if the tobacco companies got sued (and sued) for adding nicotene, ostensibly for "flavor", but more likely for its addictive properties, then what keeps our nation's soda giants from having a big chunk taken out of their posterior, courtesy of our nation's legal giants?

The answer, of course, is "lying". By which I mean using the same crummy defense: tell the people you add it for flavor.

As if the other natural flavors just couldn't match the wonderful bitterness of caffeine. Yes, that zingy bitter flavor you crave every time you gulp down that artificially sweetened soda.

What? You can't taste the bitterness? Neither can most people. Heck, I spent a good chunk of my childhood drinking caffeine-free Coke, and I couldn't taste the difference. But I could feel it.

So now the only remaining question is why, in these times of economic solemness (if not exactly depression), the states haven't banded together and tried to pry a ginormous cash settlement out of the soda companies. I'm waiting.

de-carbo-hydration

I was recently pointed to a New York Times Magazine article on fats, carbohydrates, and the much-reviled Dr. Atkins (free registration required), which, as these articles tend to do, left me skimming the last few pages and wondering what in the world I'm supposed to do with all this information.

And what I did was cook three pounds of pork sausage. Really. Not so much in response to the possibility that meat may be better for me than pastas and breads, but because the recipe called for it.

I suppose I should do a better job of reviewing a recipe before I go out like some sort of culinary robot and buy the exact quantities of foodstuffs that the recipe calls for.

I mean, it'll take me quite a while to get through eight "Ballycastle sausage rolls" of [attempts to mentally figure amount, gives up and pulls out HP programmable graphing calculator reduced to doing division] almost a third of a pound of sausage each.

Not that I really follow recipes all that strictly, but for some reason I can't find it in myself to halve the given proportions, even if those proportions come from a restaurant recipe obviously meant to serve a gaggle of frat boys.

I should also mention that it's rather unusual for me to cook meat at all, much less three pounds of sausage. It's probably safe to say that the amount of meat I cooked tonight is equal to the amount of meat I purchased in the past, oh, six months. Usually, if I want meat, I go out to a decent restaurant. But I wanted to cook sausage, dangit.

So now I have a tub full of sausage in my refrigerator, waiting to be lovingly rolled into puff pastry pockets and baked. The tub is sitting next to an equally large tub of gazpacho. You can almost feel the meat voltage between the two tubs.

But that's not the point. The point is that there is yet more data out there in the world that conflicts with other data about what it is we're supposed to eat to live longer, or happier, or smarter or something.

And in this zany postmodern world we live in, when we feel overwhelmed by conflicting data, when we feel that we are no longer in control of our lives, what do we do? That's right, we try to find some petty way to make fun of the whole situation, thereby failing to address the big issue, but nonetheless making ourselves feel as if we've done, well, something.

In this particular situation, our fun is had in reading the online transcript of two CNN talking heads discussing the whole fat/carbohydrate flap, which reads, in part, more like a poorly translated Japanese screenplay than a serious discussion of medical science, as in this exchange:

PHILLIPS: Yes, I know. It's like, how do you find the right kind?

COHEN: You know, it is saturated -- I will tell you the technical answer. Then I tell you the easy answer.

PHILLIPS: OK, please.

And in this Shakespeare-esque dialogue:

PHILLIPS: All right, Dr. Atkins is totally anti-carbs.

COHEN: Yes.

PHILLIPS: So, these influential researchers with whom you spoke, what do they say about that?

COHEN: They are not anti-carb.

It also contains the following wonderful paragraph, in which people who have earned doctorates are paraphrased to sound like idiots. More importantly, it contains an aside that would make a junior high student giggle. Can you find it?

And they all said: "Oh, no. We do not suggest that to our patients." They said: "What we think is that maybe Atkins is on to something when he says fat is not that bad. But" -- and here is the big but -- "but we tell our patients to eat 'good fats.'"

And there you have it. So what should I eat to be happier? More fats? More carbohydrates? Absent any overwhelming scientific consensus, the answer is sausage. And gazpacho. And really good bread. And whatever else I was planning on cooking before I read that article.