Man on the Phone Book

This is an entry mainly for the Olympia/Tacoma dancers who were active in the Oly/T-Town dance scene at least between September '02 and December '03.

This morning, my "Coolest Stupid Moves" sign fell off of my wall. I was already out of bed by then (1 o'clock; not really morning, I suppose), and have taped that puppy back up onto the wall where it belongs, how it belongs.

Well, maybe that's not necessarily how it belongs. The only other "Coolest Stupid Moves" sign that I've seen belongs to a dance buddy from the Jitterbug Club, Oly & Tacoma scenes: Nick, "The Stick." I think we're the only two people who got metal awards for doing Stupid Stuff in the Jitterbug club. He had a little stand for his sign; I'm sure he still displays it with pride in his house, even though he's off in Iraq now.

I don't think anybody has seen Nick for quite some time now, as he's currently deployed in Iraq. I saw a tribute to the military on the cover of the Olympia-area's most recent phonebook. The sweetheart shot in the upper left was a nice touch and caught my eye.

I spent a long time looking at that soldier in the sweetheart shot, because the photo captured a great look of happiness on his face. Also, I thought the guy looked really familiar, as did the woman. Then it hit me:

I -believe- I've seen her, Nick's girlfriend, in a picture in his house, the one time I went there. So, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Nick has a little fame to him now. I'm glad to see this good shot of him, as compared to another shot that I took in Tacoma (those resourceful enough can find it in a certain dance website's Halloween gallery).

I hope he's OK over there. I also hope he still has enough dancer's spirit in him to triple-step in his off-duty time...damn, did dancing make that man happy.

Best of luck to you, Nick.

The Hardest Fools Play Ever

Alternate title: Way more audience involvement than necessary

FP last Saturday was in a new(?) format, "Fools Play: Board Game." With two distinct, circular tracks, shaped in a figure-8 connected at "Start," a board held many spaces with the format of the next comedy bit to come: A scene, a short, a musical number, a game…or the Dreaded Jail Spot. The Fools didn't expect too many people to land in Jail.

Kobar and I went head-to-head in this game, rolling die to go around our respective circles. I rolled first, because Joff elaborately guessed that my shoe symbolized me drowning little girls at lakes, while Chris threw out measly and repeated guesses at Kobar's hackey sack. My roll: Snake Eyes, so I had to progress one space forward, into the Dreaded Jail Spot. One roll into the game, already the Jail's being exercised.

The Jail system worked like this: Stay in jail and do jack-diddly-squat, or participate in a scene on stage, to get out of jail (with no points earned). As opposed to a ritzy game of Monopoly, I saw no purpose of staying in jail, so on stage I went.

The first Jail scene had little involvement on my part, thankfully. All I had to do was stand on stage and hold paper-plate faces in front of my own face, while Ed acted out responses to my current face. Not too challenging, wholly amusing (particularly when I got the sleeping face while operating the Segway and bred Disaster).

The second Jail scene the fools had planned out was for Kobar, as he ended up on the Dreaded Jail Spot a turn or three later. His scene looked fun: He got to be the Editor of a pre-shot "Movie," choosing which special effects to add. Aaron nigh peed himself when Ed sang an operatic background to an already dramatic interrogation scene -- and the Matrix-y orbiting-camera-perspective for the final scene was great hilarity. In a to-be-legendary charge up a hill, two of the fools were speared onto the ground, but spun around in circles because "The Camera" was orbiting their scene. That was greatness.

Kobar's scene was a whole load of fun, and I would guess was the Fools' last planned "Get out of Jail" game. I don't know if they were expecting me to be so luckless to land in Jail again. I came on stage to break out once more, and Mike introduced my scene: The Scene in Reverse. I'd say I did a good job of not crapping myself.

Here's how the Scene works: It starts at the end, and then it is regressively improvised to the beginning, whereupon it goes forward again. I can not begin to explain how hard that is.

End tally of the scene: Mike only had to save me once with "Hey, man, don't freak out!" as I blanked on any sort of line to reverse-engineer. He relieved a lot of pressure on me when the scene was going forward by subtly segwaying the setting from inside a jail cell to being rescued and outdoors, in one syllable and arm motion: "POOF!" (For the record, plot consistency is freakin' hard thinking backwards.) And, I took the liberty of ending the scene because I couldn't remember where the heck it started, and [what ended up being] the ante-penultimate line was a good place to kill it anyway.

I'd have to say the worst part of The Scene in Reverse is that while going backwards, it goes on for so long, and more than half of your brainpower goes into remembering what you'll have to do later when the scene progresses to the beginning. I think I had to remember 3 minutes of Scene. I have quite the deep-seated respect for what the Fools do -- nearly every week, nonetheless.

Of course, after all this abuse, for no points, how does the game end? As the last turn, I end up on the Jail spot again. I think Mike took the liberty of bending the rules and throwing me on the adjacent Start space so nothing would happen, and I lose the game to Kobar. His first-place prize: A plastic jigsaw, fit for cutting…perhaps toilet paper, if he put some elbow grease into it.

So after doing one of the hardest scenes the Fools do, my prize is the Runner-Up Special: "The New Newlywed Game," designed only to piss off your partner as you each realize how much of each other's favorite things you've forgotten. Helluva prize for a single programmer to get, huh?

Eric

For formatting purposes, this entry has been placed in the Extended Entry field.

This entry is also in the Extended Entry to perhaps force Leah to wait for one more click to see that critter I found a week or three ago. Le voilà, after two tease entries.

Once upon a post-noon dreary, I paced to, fro, entirely bleary; I had hastily quitted the family Garage of Forgotten Floor. While I panted, heat entrapping, suddenly I saw, legs flapping, A creature's silent tapping, tapping ascent of the door. "'Tis some arachnid," I uttered, "flapping-ly climbing the door; Only this, and nothing more." But, suspicion was my habit, for I spied a trait of rabbit; Neither ear nor fuzz was present to allude to a toon's image more, But the word "Cotton" my mind grasped; A spherical image I had clasped; Though initially the reason, reasonable by tooth, no more: For the round and circular appendages to make its fangs more: Dubbed "Cottonfang Eric" forevermore.

Concert! Much sweat!

Where: Tomorrow at noon, by the Olympia Senior Center. Just follow the set of 40 blindingly white uniforms to the Lakefair Marching Band's concert on the grass; it should start a little late for peoples' lunches' sakes.

On a related note, tomorrow's also the "Disrupt Downtown Businesses" March. Again, follow the blindingly white uniforms, this time accompanied by police.

I've been looking forward to this sweatfest since last year's Lakefair parade. 'Twill be much fun, and really loud -- we've had a full compliment of bass drums since the first night, though the other percussion has wavered from half-there to all-there. I'm not sure how well we're balanced against the smaller-than-last-year band, since my hearing has started to diminish slightly. There's an inverse relationship between my ability to hear and the time Jon has been there on crash cymbals...I think the cymbals hurt my hearing much more than playing bass drum.

After tomorrow, The Parade. I'm not sure how to think about that: We were initially told that the parade route had changed, to the longer (by 6 mins) pre-quake route, but we'd only go through once. Then Lakefair booked the band for two run-throughs.

The next time I see any of you, I will be reaping quite the tan.

Valet Day: An Excerpt

(Silly note: As of this entry, I have 1111 comments. I don't suppose that appeals too much to anyone else, but it's an interesting number for me. And now, for something completely different.)

A state of unlearned-ness is potentially a danger to one's concept of self-image. However, my take on the subject allows for great humor borne of ignorance -- and I'm not exactly one for image, either.

The afternoon had grown lazy. The wedding ceremony was done and over inf ive minutes -- those people knew how to be ee-fficient. The reception took up the bulk of all the time, but eventually that winded down as well.

Katie, Jim and I were valets for the day, but the gig wasn't too terribly demanding. As people were leaving, Jim offered a shuttle service up the gravel hill (quite unpleasant in heals, I'd imagine), and between shuttlings we played cards outside their backyard's gate. We didn't see much of what was going on at the reception -- our field of view was limited to the right of the house. We heard the random selections the DJ had, including Guns & Roses ("Sweet Child of Mine") after he played Dr. Dre for a predominantly white, post-middle-aged audience. Ran-dom.

Of course, the DJ did have one traditional piece of music for "The most suggestive wedding tradition" (dubbed Jim), the Garter. Truly raunchy jazz played as the groom began his hunt under the bride's dress -- this was to the right of the house, in our view. As Jim dubbed the tradition, I looked over to see what was going on. I'd never been to a wedding before (where I was old enough to remember, anyway), and didn't actually remember the Garter until I saw the groom, well, under yonder.

Katie and Jim were quite familiar with the tradition, though, and were more attentive to the music. Katie threw out a question: "Is that 'The Stripper?'"

In my infinite hole of unlearned culture, and in complete ignorance of what they were paying attention to, I turned in shock to Katie. "No! That's the bride!"

Luckily, Jim didn't bang his head on the alumninum/glass table when he doubled over in laughter. That, ladies and gentlemen, was a Hoot.

On Spam

What amazes me about the most recent spam attack that hit FE was that I searched through the last 5000 posted comments through MT-Blacklist...and I didn't find all of them. The sheer mass of this crap is amazing. I've had 31 spam comments in 2 days. A-freakin'-mazing.

I wrote a little about MT-Blacklisting in a forum post here. It's sorta taking initiative away from webmaster Chen, but I prefer that people know about the de-spamming process as early as possible; pardon, Caius.

I just looked at a few things, and found them fairly amusing:

• The view count on that forum thread I linked above was 593 on July 3rd. Now, July 6th, the count has jumped up to 825. Dubious.
• The most recent spam site to attack, (in l33t sp34k so I don't give it -another- plug) |_1/\/uxw@ve$.net, is a spoof of its similarly named .com site -- only, a search for it on Google unfortunately turns it up as the second hit, a huge collection of many pornographic...adjectives. I really, really wonder why sites like that even exist -- I suspect the answer is to spread Trojans around and smear the official .com site. It's all quite disappointing, nonetheless, to see that garbage being generated.

This bug was deadly.

That title was meant to tease: Leah. Sorry, Leah, but the MemStick drive is still inoperable, due to Java constraints, work constraints...and the 4 hours of Star Trek on Friday nights.

About that MemStick drive: It is built in to the computer I use the most at home. So, what could be the problem with it, if the driver's theoretically right there? The OS that used that driver is dead. Quite dead. Turns out Damian picked up a Trojan last Friday when I was at a movie marathon, and it prevented the computer from booting in that OS; it even reduced the colors down to 16. No, not 16-bit, 16. XP is hideous in 16, for the record.

So for the past week, I've been doing all of my Java coding on a computer with a third the processor speed, a quarter the RAM, and a flatscreen (but not flat) monitor two inches bigger. That last part may sound good, until one considers that it burns with the Brightness of a Thousand Suns, with scanlines a-plenty, and I have to sit about a foot away from it due to table constraints.

At work, on my first day, I had an LCD monitor, set about two or two and a half feet away from my head, with plenty of desk space and a keyboard tray in between. That was really nice. But, then I couldn't come in the next week (finals & evaluations), and they switched it out with a much more 3-dimensional 19" CRT, that rests at the edge of that now-enveloped desk space. I still get a foot and a half distance from the monitor -- a foot if I'm in the "Pondrous Pose," or the "The Thinker" pose -- but its wideness is barely shy of optimal for my eyes.

Now, I stare at that screen for about 7 hours a day -- with breaks for lunch and ping-pong with the boss -- and then I come home and I get to code at that horrible, horrible Dell monitor. (Nothing against Dell, it's just that their Trinitron monitor has crapped out on me pretty well.) The headache and tired eyes were inevitable. But, I had to get my work done for the contract.

Solution: A few nights ago, I actually wore sunglasses while writing Java code. At 10 o'clock at night.

But now, the main computer is [sorta] back in gear: My dad put a copy of XP Pro on another drive, and the Trojan missed that. So, with no real file loss, the computer is almost as good as before. Nothing works except for the games, because their dlls are stored in their own folders independent of OS...A virus scan is now installed...I've got Firefox back...and Office is back in. I only need to get my Outlook Address Book back from...I don't know where, actually. Can somebody help me on that (by e-mail or comment)?

Oh, point of the story: While the computer recognizes it has a floppy, DVD and DVD-RW drive, it doesn't know that the extra hole in the front is for a Memory Stick. I doubt it even knows that it has another hole. (I'll try to coax Cassie into telling a story about a little girl that relates to that hole thing.) I took pictures recently of another bug, but I don't think it'll be quite so hard for Leah or anyone else to find -- just another instance of people around me filling in the holes of my education.

For instance, did you guys know that Benny Goodman played clarinet? I obviously haven't been in the swing scene long enough, or I've been away too long, because I didn't know until Jen (Clark) told me a couple nights ago. It's nice having people to fill in one's educational holes. I really enjoy being around the knowin' folk.