Jurassic Workblogging

Another in my occasional series of ancient quasi-blog pieces from the distant past. This time it's a rant about my time toiling in the telco world, dating from some time back in the mid-late 90's, so it's not as old as the last couple of pieces I've posted here. This would've been a blog piece back then, if blogs had existed back then. I've changed the name of the company to protect the guilty. In retrospect I can't bring myself to be quite so hard on them. They paid for a few key CS classes at the local college which helped me break into the programming business, so I guess I ought to thank them for that, if they still existed. Also, while I was there I had the privilege of voting to unionize the call center, although once the vote succeeded I couldn't actually afford the union dues and never joined up. But still, it's something to brag about. The company was pretty screwed up, and the customers I had to deal with were even more screwed up, hence the following rant.

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A few notes from the front lines of the directory assistance racket...

I've never had a job quite like this, working here at GloboTelCom. I don't think I'll be wanting another like it. I can't think of another job where you come in contact with a more disturbed cross-section of humanity short of being a shrink. A few cases in point:

Yesterday, a lady called up wanting the number of NASA in Moscow, saying she had something she needed to tell them about the space station. Failing that, maybe the NASA office in Kamchatka would help. Sure, lady. Still, maybe I'm a geography snob, but just someone using Kamchatka in a sentence makes me not write them off totally. So I tell her I only serve the US. That's fine, she says, just give her NASA in Houston. I can do that, so I do. I figure they've got trained professionals who deal with these types all day. She wants the number of NASA in Florida, too, which I also have, and then wants to know if I've ever been to the Mir station. No, I get motion-sick in space, ma'am, sorry that I can't help you there. It's best to play along. They like that. It's going well. So that about does it for NASA, but she also needs the phone number for the north pole. Well, ma'am, I may have to transfer you over to international directory for that. She's amenable, so I push a couple of buttons and she's off. I'm not sure the international operators appreciate us, but I appreciate them sometimes.

Someday someone's going to call me and want to talk to space aliens. This country is soaked in extraterrestrial hype, and we bear the brunt of all the latest fads. If I was a silly, grits-for-brains tabloid feeder, it would seem perfectly natural to be able to call up GloboTelCom and ask for the phone numbers for some aliens. I'm relishing the chance. Oddly, I'm relishing the opportunity to not be mean to the caller. I'd tell them first, that calling other worlds isn't a market our company currently serves, though I expect we'll jump in as soon as a reliable method emerges, since interplanetary long distance rates would be VERY lucrative. On the other hand, if the caller's not trying to call another planet, but wants to reach space aliens living among us on Earth, I'll tell 'em it works just like anybody else. If they know the name of a certain alien and what city they're in, and preferably an address, I can help them, but we don't have physical descriptions on file. If someone has three heads and a hundred greasy tentacles, but goes by John Smith and lives in Chicago, and that's all you know, there's very little I can do.

Other people have wondered whether we have physical descriptions on file. Usually these are older southerners who demand to know whether somebody under a certain name is black or white. Strikes them as perfectly logical that we would keep track. One man asked if we could find someone by social security number if he also had a physical description, and began reading it off like it was off a police bulletin: Young black male, medium build, about 6'2"... I wasn't able to be very helpful there.

But give me a name, the more unusual the better, and a city, or even just a state, or a couple of possible states, or just a vague idea of where so-and-so might be, and I'll see what I can do. I like a challenge. Once I found a guy's long-lost father who he hadn't seen in 20 years. There's probably a good story in that. Maybe a happy story, maybe a sad one, and I'll never know. I was just a tiny cog in the machine. If I'm lucky, maybe someone will remember I went the extra mile for them, but I doubt they'll remember my name. Whether I work miracles, or barely avoid getting fired every single day, the company doesn't really care, and it pays me exactly the same either way. Eventually you find your own ways to make the job feel rewarding. Working miracles is mine. Working miracles, and being extra-nice to "difficult" people, crazies, drunks, and so forth.

Drunks are fun. Drunks love me. Drunk, fortyish southern men are easy. Show them a little kindness and they eat out of your hand and get all weepy and choked up. When they tell you all about their guns, they aren't threatening you. They're just being sentimental and looking for a bit of male bonding. Elderly women are the nasty ones, especially the mildly bewildered ones who figure that being 85 means you know everything. They'll argue that something is still there because it was there back in the forties. They think I'm nuts when I tell them the area code's changed on them and want to argue. They get irate if you tell them they called the wrong area code and you can't help them. Really we ought to be able to help them, but we really can't, and there's not a blessed thing we can do about it.

Our center's only been open a couple of years, but we've already got a rich vein of folklore going. Full moons, for example. Nobody wants to work on full moons, because that's when all the crazies call us. Which isn't actually true. The crazies call us every day. Full moon, new moon, after the normal people go to bed its nothing but crazies and drunks and screamers until the sun comes up.

Screamers are frustrating. Someone will call up, already steaming hot from something else, and half the time you can't even find out what they want you to do before they demand your supervisor. Usually that takes a while, so they hang up. I hate being threatened, even by people who are incoherent and completely powerless. Mostly this is because the company is screwed up and might be inclined to believe whatever lies these people make up.

Yes, I have a bit to say about the company. I've never seen such a disorganized, sloppy, and poorly run outfit. Back when I was in the museum business, the place I worked was disorganized, sloppy, and often poorly run by the top echelons, but just about everyone was committed body and soul to getting the job done. At GloboTelCom, nobody much cares whether we do the job right. We use a strictly third-rate database that mysteriously lacks many perfectly correct, current phone numbers. Well, not that mysteriously: The database is provided by an outside firm that used to have the contract to do what we do now. They still serve part of the country that we don't cover, and management can switch area codes from us to them or vice versa on a whim. They make more money providing the full service than they do just providing the database... Gee. Can anyone other than me see the conflict of interest here? The company's still stuck in the old Ma Bell frame of mind and figures that a clunky, ad-hoc approach is good enough, and that if we enrage our customers by not having their number when they know it's there, it doesn't really matter because there are always more customers. Why give employees the basic tools they need to do the job right, when not doing so is a little cheaper? If they aren't happy, you can always hire new employees, especially if you locate your call centers in cities with high unemployment and a low education level. Our center and its smaller cousin in Slagsburg, PA are swamped with calls when we cover only a few states; we couldn't possibly cover the entire country ourselves, and I'm thinking we were never intended to. I'm not sure what the true Machiavellian scheme here is, whether we're just an expensive negotiating ploy to cut a good deal with that outside company, or whatever, but our customers are the ones who suffer.

Utility Co. Emoticon

Ok, probably not an actual emoticon, per se, but I can't read that secret code stuff the utility companies scrawl on our streets every summer, and human brains are wired up to see faces, and it looks like a face to me, so I'm calling it an emoticon.

In fact, if it's a face, it may as well be a famous face. I'm going to go with Einstein, because of the hair. It's a shame it doesn't look more like a Jesus or a Virgin Mary, though, since that's where the big bucks are. You could, like, sneak down and quietly jackhammer it out of the street at 3AM when nobody will notice, except for homeless people and folks who hung around the bar til closing time (2:30 by law in Oregon), and nobody will believe those people anyway, so why not? Oh, and then sell it on eBay, of course. [Legal Disclaimer: Don't actually do this in real life, or if you do, don't tell the pigs who gave you the idea.]

I saw this on my way to the grocery store to address a serious beer drought at home. I finally tracked down the Green Flash West Coast IPA in bottle form, plus the Organic Revolution X from Butte Creek, both of which I had recently at the OBF. The latter is one of the beers I tried after shorting out my taste buds (in a good way) with that infamous Pliny the Elder stuff, and I feel I didn't really do it justice, and since I always strive for fairness and accuracy in this here blog, I figured the decent thing would be to give it another try, and have it first this time. So I may report on that in the near future.

Right now, at this very moment, they have a bit of street closed off across from Powell's, around the weird sculpture most people know as "Satan's Testicle". Chain link fence, festooned with tiki torches and such, with Bob Marley playing, and sand piled all over the street. It looked a little weird, but mostly sort of lame, in a corporate promotion sort of way. Marketing people all think the same, regardless of what industry they work in. Probably at some point in the evening a Bacardimobile or the equivalent will roll up, and a bevy of enthusiastic spokesmodels will join the festivities. I guess there could be worse summer jobs than that, but still. Feh.

I didn't take a picture of that, because it looked lame, but I did get a picture of one of the display windows at Spartacus, which is on the way to the grocery store, seriously. Two female mannequins, one spanking the other silly. Naughty, naughty mannequin. I'm not posting it here, though. Not because of the content, oddly enough, but because in the window you can see a reflection of me taking the picture, and I don't post pictures of myself here, just like I don't give my actual name or address or SSN, or say where I work, or exactly how old I am, or anything like that, because the words here are supposed to speak for themselves, and stand or fall on their own merits, or lack thereof, or whatever, and who I am in RL doesn't matter. I'm nobody important. Ok, mostly it's just that I'm antisocial and I like anonymity. And then there's a certain loony netkook I've tangled with in the past to think about. Plus my hair's kind of messy in the photo because of the wind, and it's not a good photo of me, and I'm self-conscious, so I'm not posting it, already, dammit. So anyway, if I can come up with a good photo of mannequin bondage that doesn't include me, I may post it here, if I get around to it.

not my bestest friday post ever

This post, sadly, lacks any organizing principle of any kind. In my defense, it's been busy, busy, busy down in the salt mine this week, so I've been slacking off in my blogging obligations. So when I get a spare moment, I just toss together a few photos and add some tidbits I found on the interwebs, with random snarky commentary of my own, and voila.

• First off, I've spent a decent amount of this week's few posts hinting at why I've been so busy. Here's yet another reason: _beginthreadex() goooood. CreateThread() baaaaaaaad.
  
• The top photo is a rose in front of a fraternity house near Portland State University. Yes, apparently they have someone who tends their roses. I don't know what to think about that.
  
• The middle photo is of a fountain hidden in the underground parking garage of the Union Bank of California Building, in downtown Portland. Many months ago I promised I'd take a photo of it and post it here, and now I have. I always keep my promises, when I remember them.
  
• The bottom photo is "Rusting Chunks No. 5" (a.k.a. Leland One) at night. I guess they light it at night so people won't walk into it and injure themselves, or something.
  
• And now for tidbits: The fundies are freaking out over the dangers of sending your kid to college. Not, you know, the perils of fraternity hazing or final exam stress or anything like that. It's that with all that education and open-mindedness and critical thinking, some kids come out of it not being bigoted fundies anymore. Well, I would certainly hope so, otherwise what's the point of sending them to college?
  
• The "Mystic Dwarf" Judge in the Phillippines has his own blog. Words fail me. Enjoy.
  
• Here's a silly piece over at Treehugger that attempts to explain why having a second home is actually good for the environment. Because, apparently, so long as you're an affluent, liberal-minded, educated sort of person who thinks happy, benevolent thoughts about the Earth, anything you want is good for the environment, by definition. Feh.
  
• Researchers have tracked down a gene that responsible for differences between human and chimpanzee brains. Well, the creationists would probably beg to differ about that. If researchers could point to a handful of key genes and show how they mutated as humans diverged from other primates, well, that simply wouldn't do. Since fundies run our government, don't be surprised if the researchers lose their funding in the near future.
  
• No, I haven't seen SoaP yet. Maybe when it comes to a pub-theater. Seems like a movie that would go better with a drink or three. I mean, I wrote about it here, on this very blog, before the movie came out and everything, and I got absolutely no schwag from the studio, no free tickets, no expenses-paid trip to the premiere, nothing. Bastards. Ingrates. So I'm feeling a little bitter about that, I have to tell you.
  
• The latest weird twist in the SCO saga. If you're suing someone, and the judge keeps ruling against you because you have no case, what do you do? Go find a different judge on the other side of the country who doesn't know the case, and isn't assigned to the case, but will rule in your favor anyway, for some reason. I don't think you're supposed to be able to do this.
  
• It's official: Humboldt squid are bastards (Yes, this is today's cephalopod item from Pharyngula.)
  
• Jon Swift explains Senator George Allen. Personally, every time I hear the word "macaca", it makes me think of the catchy-annoying title song from Rififi. (Yes, I do occasionally watch good movies, believe it or not.) The song's just begging for new, topical lyrics, and I have no musical talent whatsoever, so the field's wide open. Be my guest.
  
• A bit at DailyKos about the 2001 anthrax letters. I'm not a person who buys into conspiracy theories, but it sure is weird how nobody seems to want to talk about the case anymore. Is anyone still assigned to the case, even? Once the bugs had been ID'd as having come from one of our own weapons-grade strains, you'd think the list of potential suspects would be far from infinitely long, and you could just go down the list of people who had access to the stuff. They do keep records about that sort of thing, right?
  
• I see the city's tweaking its styrofoam ban. Back in college, I was part of a group that lobbied in favor of the ordnance, and I helped picket a downtown McDonalds because they were fighting the ban. Whether the ban was a good idea or not, and whether it made a difference in the end, I really don't know. The whole ozone layer thing has taken a back seat to global warming over the last few years. I do know that trying to save the world is a great way to meet members of the opposite sex (or same, if you prefer). This is not to say that college students aren't motivated by ideals, certainly not, but people are just that much more enthusiastic if they can mix business with pleasure, so to speak.
  
• Meanwhile, in the recreational math department, I'm trying to wrap my brain around the notion of forcing in set theory, which is proving to be tough going. There aren't a lot of treatments out there for the nonprofessional; it seems to be assumed that if you're interested in it, you already know how it works. Here are two links that I found reasonably comprehensible. Apparently the idea is to somehow conjure up additional real numbers with certain desired properties, and add them to the normal set of real numbers, in order to prove various things. For instance, if X and Y are true of the real numbers, but in your newly created set X is still true without Y being true, Y is independent of X (for instance, X=ZFC, Y=Continuum Hypothesis). Or at least that's how I gather it works. I'm curious about the newly-added numbers themselves: what they are, what they're like, where they "come from", and so forth, and I haven't found a lot of info on that point yet. For instance, if the "normal" real numbers completely fill the real line, where do the additional numbers go, if they aren't equal to any of the existing numbers? So far, it's a mystery to me.
  
• I admit it, I, too, am a fiend for mojitos. Yes, I realize they were so two years ago (or was it three?) until that stupid Miami Vice movie came out (which I haven't even seen). But still, they're pretty damn tasty. Besides, even now, I still have to explain to various friends, relatives, and coworkers what a mojito is, which means they have absolutely no idea I'm drinking an untrendy lamer's drink. Always drink with dorks, that's the takeaway from this item.
  
• This site has a small photo of a baby silky anteater, riding on its mother's back. Awwwwwwwww.... (Also see my earlier 100%-silkie post).
  
• Aieee! It's "Evil Dead, The Musical"! Run!
  
• And at Mondo Schlocko, the vintage trailer for Attack of the Puppet People. They just don't make movies like that anymore.
  

Deimos+

A recent image of Deimos, the dinky outer moon of Mars, taken by Mars Global Surveyor.

Other assorted geekage:

• In other space news, the "what is a planet" debate rages on. Look for my contribution among the comments over at The Panda's Thumb, in the unlikely event that you care.
  
• A piece at Space.com shows why splitting hairs over planetary barycenters is a silly idea.
  
• In RL news, I finally came across a good explanation for why my Windows app goes bonkers when it approaches 2000 worker threads during torture testing. That's just way too many worker threads, anyway. I may need to do something about that.
  
• Also, the latest news on that weird Russian mathematician who sorted out the Poincare Conjecture a couple of years ago.
  
• Here's an article about some sort of "killer hybrid mutant" creature in the backwoods of Maine. Looks like a dog to me, quite honestly. (You need to scroll down -- the top picture is for an unrelated story.) All the accounts I can find are lurid and kind of tabloidy. I expect all the cryptozoological excitement will go away once they do some basic DNA testing on the thing.
  
• The latest about dark matter. Seems that when galaxies collide, the dark matter just slides right through the cataclysm and keeps on going its merry way, as if a billion-star apocalypse was really no big deal. Dark matter is cool that way.
  

Burnishing my Hipster Credentials

After spending much of the previous post lamenting my tragic non-hipsterdom, I figured I really ought to do something about it. This post is the result. The top photo is a detail of a funky sculpture on NE Alberta St., somewhat near the Mash Tun brewpub I mentioned. I suppose really the only hipsteresque thing about it is the location, so, ok, primarily the photo's here because I just thought it looked kind of cool. So whatever, or not.



Ok, so that first photo didn't help a great deal (although check out that cool, indifferent "who cares" attitude of mine right there at the end -- neato!). Anyway, let's try a different tack now. The second photo is a grainy B&W photo of an open can of PBR on my desk at the office, taken a few minutes ago. I get points for that, right? Ok, ok, I'll admit the can's been empty for like two years now, and I only drank it on a dare, and I didn't enjoy it. But still. I own an empty PBR can, anyway. That ought to count for something. It's part of my colorful cubicle collage-o-pop-culture. We programmers have to do eccentric stuff like this, or we'll lose our mystique, and Management will wise up and stop paying us big bucks for mostly surfing the net all day. We mustn't tell them it's all a conscious act, either. It helps if they think we're all borderline insane. It's great for job security. They'll come to think that the only way they can replace you is if they find someone who's crazy in precisely the same way that you are, and what are the odds of that?

The books to the left of the beer can are Nagar's Windows NT File System Internals, and an ancient copy of Brockschmidt's Inside OLE, in case you realized those were books and were curious.

Let's see... What else have I got in the way of street cred... Um, I need to go to the optometrist anyway sooner or later, and I could in theory get myself a pair of those black-rimmed retro indie-rock glasses everyone's wearing, just so I can be like everyone else. I'm not making any promises, but I'm saying it's at least theoretically possible, that much is certain. I've never really understood why the sort of rims your glasses have matters so much, but everyone's doing it, so it's obviously crucial, so I guess I'd better follow the herd here. Plus, I love tater tots. I do. Seriously.

Oh, and I also know a bit of Perl and have a MySpace account, but I'm way too cool to actually use either of them. I sneer at your crufty Perl. Ruby beats up your kludgy Perl and steals its lunch money. So there. Ha.

Also, I personally know multiple people who are in actual bands. Bands you definitely haven't heard of, in fact. They're so obscure even I don't know what they sound like, although I know for a (mostly) absolute fact they exist. I also know their early stuff was, like, a million times better, back before they sold out. How cool is that?

I think I'm going to go have some tater tots now. Whatever.

amnesia

When you realize the supposed bug you're scratching your head over is happening because you've brought the corporate network to its knees trying to locate a different, customer-reported bug (with the boss's full approval & active participation, I hasten to add) - you just know it's time for a beer. So I'm up at Amnesia Brewing on trend-o-licious Mississippi Avenue right now, sipping a Desolation IPA. I actually like their other IPA (Copacetic IPA) better, but I already had one of those, and I'm all about variety and all that. The Desolation is a little stronger, and less hoppy than the Copacetic, which is basically a pint of tasty Amarillo hop nectar. Mmmmmmm....... And the sausages are pretty damn delicious, too.

You'd never mistake me for a hipster, not even a mildly aging one. I might have walked past the old X-Ray Cafe at the very moment Kurt met Courtney, but I wasn't cool enough to go inside, so I don't know for sure. You've probably heard of bands that I haven't. It pains me that many of the city's newer breweries have located in the city's hipster colonies, since everyone knows hipsters drink nothing but PBR anyway. Ok, not strictly true. A hipster friend (who's also my token bike-fascist and off-leash-dog hipster friend) is a real rebel and drinks Olympia. Or was it Rainier? I can never tell the difference.

Anyway, that's all by way of explanation so you don't get the wrong idea, since yesterday I was up on even-trendier Alberta St., although in my defense it was strictly for the beer. The new Mash Tun brewpub is there, tucked behind an ultra-cool hipster office supply shop(!), so a visit was inevitable. Decent IPA, very tasty porter, great falafel. Mmmmmm.....

Yes, friends, it's a real chore keeping up with our fair city's explosion of beery goodness. But as chores go, hey, it could be worse. Much, much worse.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Squirrel & Butterfly: The Remake

The present post is sort of a remake of this older post, but this time around, the butterfly comes first. This ceramic butterfly is in a tree near the intersection of SW Broadway & Burnside, downtown. I don't know who put it there or why, but I'm sure it must be Art.



Homicidal attack squirrel with a nut, in the North Park Blocks. Not the best squirrel photo ever, but it's what I've got right now. The squirrel was striking all sorts of cute photogenic poses, but the other photos didn't turn out so well. The usual blurry squirrel phenomenon. This time I blame the double espresso I'd just had a few minutes earlier.


As with the original post, now I switch gears and deliver a few random thoughts about the ongoing Lebanon situation. I see both sides have now reluctantly agreed to stop fighting as of tomorrow, although with all sorts of caveats about what the precise definition of "fighting" is and what "stop" really means. I have this funny feeling that this war isn't going to resolve anything. All the talking heads on TV were cheerleading for this war, saying it was World War III, the final war that was going to fix everything and set the world right, once and for all. Turns out it was an ugly, pointless, monthlong border skirmish, without a clear victory for either side.

The talking heads aren't going to apologize for shamelessly demagoguing this little conflict, though. They ought to, but they won't. They've been promoting this war as the grand opening salvo in the exciting new war they'd like the US to wage against Iran. Bush, Cheney, and friends seem to be totally sold on the idea, and there's no convincing them otherwise. For the latest, check out the new Seymour Hersh piece in the New Yorker, and these comments about it. You know things have gotten bad when even the LaRouche crowd are calling Dubya a psycho nutjob. Yeeesh.

Meanwhile, it looks like Darfur is on the back burner again, and various activists are demanding that Bush do something about it. I have to respectfully disagree here. Nobody seems to have a concrete plan on what to do, other than saying the situation is terrible and the world ought to do something about it. Encouraging Bush to send in the marines is never a smart idea, especially when the goal is unclear, and the means to achieving that goal are far from obvious. I'm not a pacifist, I'm not an isolationist, and I'm not exactly a foreign-policy "realist". There's room for idealistic foreign policy, just so long as the goals are clear and realistic, and you don't make the world a worse place in the process. Too much idealism is a recipe for more war, not less. I hate dictators as much as the next person, but a policy of bombing random dictators back into the stone age in the name of democracy and human rights is maybe not the best plan in the world. Asking Bush to "do something" means giving him permission to kill people, because diplomacy is to be scorned and ridiculed. Even if you personally just want nice happy-faced peacekeepers in blue helmets, handing out candy and making the badness stop, to Bush it's carte blanche to start bombing. Give Bush permission to bomb Sudan in the name of those poor people in Darfur, and he won't actually turn the place into an idyllic Sweden-on-the-Nile. It'll become another of his endless jihads-for-Jesus, with more roadside bombs, more Abu Ghraibs, all the fun stuff we've come to expect from him and his people. And then he'll blame it all on 9/11, just like Iraq. Let Bush have a war in Sudan, and he'll find a way to make a bad situation worse, mark my words. Yes, what's going on in Darfur is awful, there's no doubt about that, but right now I feel I have to oppose any new foreign adventures, anywhere, for any reason. I can't see changing my mind so long as Bush is in office. I'll wait and see who we get stuck with after 2008. If it's someone who helped get us involved in Iraq, Hillary for example, I'll have serious doubts about their judgment and ability as well.

Night of the Lepus

Ok, kids, it's bad movie time again. I finally got around to watching the legendary killer-bunny movie Night of the Lepus the other night. And ohhhh, it's as bad as they all said it would be. I mentioned the movie once already, in this post, which is mostly about endangered rabbits, etc.

If you google for the movie, you'll find dozens upon dozens of bad-movie sites praising and/or making fun of the movie (it's basically the same thing), since the film is actually quite famous if you move in the right circles.

If you want a really short plot synopsis, it seems that fluffy lil' bunnies are eating the local ranchers out of house & home, so a couple of scientists from State U. are called in. They try some sort of hormone thing to disrupt the rabbit breeding cycle, but it goes horribly wrong, and the rabits grow to 150 lbs. and become carnivorous. They maraud around for a while and terrorize the locals, until the authorities herd them on to a stretch of electrified railroad track. Bzzzt. The end. If you want a more detailed plot synopsis, you can't go wrong with the long, funny piece at The Agony Booth.

Other worthwhile reviews & comments at

• BadMovies.org
• Slant Magazine
• 1000 Misspent Hours
• MMI Reviews
• Wikipedia doesn't have a lot to say, but has a couple fun bits of movie trivia.
• DVD Drive-In
• Attack of the 50 Foot DVD
• Kev's Cupboard
• A guy speculating on how to remake the movie.

Unlike a lot of the reviewers, I don't think the plague-of-cute-animals environmental disaster story is inherently awful. Offhand I can't think of a 70's B movie that pulled it off, but look at The Trouble with Tribbles, or the 1988 documentary Cane Toads (which I highly recommend). If you're making a movie like this, your goal has to be to make something even more compelling and scary than either a documentary about the same subject, or a serious film that sticks close to the true facts of the matter would be. That's harder than you might think. A plague of bunnies, or frogs, or locusts, or whatever, certainly spells economic and ecological disaster, but the creatures themselves don't represent an immediate threat to life and limb in the classic monster movie way.

Lepus tries to up the stakes by making the bunnies huge and carnivorous. If the filmmakers had come up with a way of making them even slightly menacing on screen, this might have worked. But sadly, the film's rabbits are so cuuuuute and cuddly, you want them to sit in your lap and eat carrots out of your hand, even when they're supposedly leaping off cliffs and devouring full-grown cows and horses. Tribbles works because it doesn't try to make the beasties scary. They're adorable, fuzzy, and nonthreatening, but they just keep multiplying at an incredible rate and nobody can muster the will to do anything about it because they're all so damn cute and fuzzy-wuzzy. I'm not going to bash the movie too much for not having scary rabbits, because I'm not sure scary rabbits are possible, no matter how much money you've got. Peter Jackson and a billion dollars worth of CG couldn't make rabbits scary.

Although to make matters worse, Lepus has fluffy little bunnies, not even wild jackrabbits or anything, and shooting them in slow motion next to model train sets doesn't even make them look big, much less frightening. There are a few quick shots with (apparently) people in bunny suits, too. If you blink you'll miss 'em, which may be a curse or a blessing. I actually felt cheated. I mean, if you're making a bad movie, take it and run with it, don't be shy. Although I kind of doubt people in bunny suits can ever be scary either. And yes, I've seen Donnie Darko, at the behest of various indie-film-geek friends. Sorry. Not impressed. Yes, there's also the killer bunny in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but it's not exactly scary-looking, as such, and all you need is one Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, and poof, problem solved.

The rabbits aren't the film's only problems. You find yourself rooting for the rabbits because none of the human stars are very likable. Most of the time you can barely tell them apart, with the possible exception of a mustachioed DeForest Kelley as a dynamite-totin' university president -- and I'm sorry, but he really needs a Shatner to play off of. I'm sure there's got to be a whole genre of Bones McCoy-themed fan fiction out there, but I'm also sure it's not the largest fanfic genre by any means. By the same token, Shatner needs Kelley too, or he's sunk too. Ever seen his western, "White Comanche"? He plays half-breed twins, one good, one evil, where the good twin embraces his white half, and the evil twin has gone all movie-Indian savage, peyote and all. I could swear I've written about this movie before, but apparently I haven't.

Anyway, there are a few nice, corny B-movie lines, but the acting's generally pretty drab, Kelley included. It doesn't help that most of the actors are seriously getting on in years, again, Kelley included. Would it have really killed anyone to add, say, a buff 20-something grad student and his miniskirted hippie-chick girlfriend? They could be the voices of reason, expressing doubts about messing around with nature and all that, another thing the movie seriously needed. Also, lose the kids. Kids in monster movies are annoying, unless they're there as monster chow, which is rarer than it ought to be.

The movie actually throws all sorts of people on the screen who by all rights ought to be bunny treats, just by the conventions of the genre. Among the film's many lab-coated scientists, there's a black guy and a guy in a wheelchair, and neither get eaten. A family passes through the area in a car, refusing to pick up one of our main characters as he tries to hitchhike by waving a rifle in the air(!). They find the now-abandoned town where the rabbits have just been marauding, while searching for gas, or a hot meal, or something. They don't get eaten either. At the movie's climax, the authorities order everyone at a nearby drive-in theater to help out by forming a line of cars, using the cars' headlights to scare the bunnies onto the electrified railroad tracks, while at the same time the national guard sprays the area with machine gun fire, and I think flamethrowers too. They don't lose a single soldier or drive-in teenager in the process, which makes no sense. It's a monster movie -- if you're a soldier or a teenager in a monster movie, getting eaten or otherwise mauled by the film's uncanny beasties is what you're for, fer cryin' out loud. As far as movie monsters go, the rabbits are really falling down on the job here.

The fact that the film's filled with movie has-beens is actually kind of interesting. Maybe it's useful to think of this movie as a transitional phase as the classic monster movie evolved into the classic 70's disaster movie. Even washed-up movie stars from decades past can be a plus at the box office, at least compared to the character actors and complete unknowns you usually get in 50's-60's monster flicks. Sometimes they can even act. What's more, Lepus is an MGM film, made during the final death throes of the classic studio system, so it's possible they were stuck with all these has-beens on long term contracts anyway, and they & the studio all rode off into the sunset together making movies like this. Hey, it's a theory. For some reason, the filmmakers also thought they ought to toss in some gore. "Gore" in this movie means people lying around without a scratch on them, splashed with an odd red-orange substance that I guess is supposed to be blood, but which looks much more like tempera paint, or possibly carrot juice. I don't really understand the decision to add the gore, except that that's what everyone was doing back in the 70's, now that there was no longer a Code to prevent it. Maybe we can chalk this one up as an early, naive example of movie gore, from way back before anyone knew what actual blood looked like in real life. Maybe that's it. But I still don't know why they bothered.

The real star of the movie has to be the sound guy, desperately trying to make the movie scary in postproduction. We get all sorts of growling and snarling wild animal noises whenever the rabbits are near, and someone's forever noodling away on a timpani, desperately trying to create feelings of tension and dread. The timpani player probably gave himself a repetitive strain injury, and for what? The movie just isn't scary. But the sound guy still gets a gold star for effort. It's not his fault he was given a supremely crappy movie to fix.



If you liked Lepus, you're bound to love Frogs, another early-70's eco-monster movie. Rich family lives in the swamp, has been dumping toxins into the swamp and otherwise being mean to the wildlife, and now it's payback time, and the people are offed one by one. As with bunnies, there's no plausible way for an ordinary frog to harm a human being, so when they do in Ray Milland (!) at the end all you see are tons of frogs hopping around his mansion, and one hops onto his record player, stopping it, and then the lights go out, and there's (I think) the sound of breaking glass, and a scream, the end. Killer frogs aren't the only attraction here -- we also get to see someone smothered to death by falling spiderwebs and assorted motionless rubber insects. I've forgotten how nature gets revenge on the others, but I seem to recall it was similarly "inventive".

I guess I could be spending my time watching actual good movies, but where's the fun in that? If I'm going to be bored silly, I'd rather be bored by a stupid B movie than a pretentious art film. At least this way I can't be accused of not comprehending the manifold subtleties of the auteur's vision, because it's pretty obvious that in Lepus, there's no auteur, no vision, and no subtleties. At least, no subtleties that I'm aware of, anyway.

Friday Flowers & Flotsam

From reading this blog, you might come away thinking I'm some sort of botany freak, what with the constant stream of flower photos I keep posting. But really that isn't true at all. Most of the time I can't identify them, and I'm sure I couldn't grow them, if I was inclined to try, which I'm not. Basically my interest here is that flowers tend to photograph well. I've tried taking pictures of other stuff, but quite often I end up looking like an incompetent schmoe. Flowers are easy.



Also, they're good blog filler for those days when I otherwise wouldn't get a post out the door. Take today, for example. The whole week's been consumed with RL work, and insufficient sleep, and I doubt today will be an exception. I may complain now and then, but I like my job; I just don't think it's much of a blogging topic. If work is all you can talk about in your non-work life, you probably need a nice tropical vacation, now.



So I started out gathering another batch of odds and ends, mostly stuff I ran across while feedgrazing last night & this morning. That's basically what yesterday's post was, so I was having trouble mustering enthusiasm for two of these babies in a row. It felt like cheating, somehow. I just looked at the list and figured, you know, it's nice and all, there's some good stuff there, but this post still needs more cowbell. Hence the flowers. The top is a magnolia or tulip tree I saw on the way to work a few days ago. The bottom two I have no clue about, I'm afraid.

Which brings us to today's tasty mishmash-o-links. A number of these were found while reading ORBlogs, so if you're a regular like me this may give you a certain feeling of deja vu.

• Butterflies goin' at it.
  
• Dogs in bee costumes
  
• The ongoing adventures of Chad Vader, Darth's underachieving kid brother, day shift manager at a grocery store.
  
• A chemistry student explains Hell.
  
• $11 Margaritas? Excuse me? Sheesh. I mean, price isn't the main reason I prefer beer, but it sure is a nice fringe benefit. You can get a hell of a lot of beer, good beer, for $11.
  
• Ooh, ooh, Dahlia alert. Upcoming show on the 25th, at a new club in Old Town that I've never been to. Yet.
  
• NYT on switching to the Mac. I've used Macs on and off since the 512KE era, back before Macs had hard drives, even. Most of the time I'm stuck with Windows (although home is an M$-free zone), but in my heart I never unswitched. Gee, aren't techie oldtimer reminiscences fun? I bet next you'd like to hear about IBM XT clones with 10MB HDs where you had to manually park the disk heads before shutting the machine down, or you ran the risk of serious hardware damage. Kids these days, they don't know how easy they have it.
  
• Yes, kids these days have it easy, not like us back in the dark ages circa 1980. You've probably seen that already, but my sister sent it to me, and I figured the modern thing to do would be to post an url rather than email a freakin' word document around. That's so 20th century.
  
• OTOH, back in the day we didn't have scary Windows security advisories to worry about. So maybe it all balances out in the end, I dunno.
  
• Remember this Sierra Mist commercial from a while back? Life really does imitate art, I guess.
  
• And what's with that tasting-the-baby-bottle business, anyway? It's discrimination, that's what it is.
  
• A Seattle blogger's rant about the city's "Discovery Institute", a leading outpost of the creationist fundie brigade.
  
• At a subway station in London, some cool mosaics of scenes from Hitchcock movies.
  
• Great post at Portland Food & Drink about the joy of sour Belgian beers. I think a lot of people don't get these, since they taste so completely different than the beer they're used to. A recent Saveur article covers some of the same territory.
  
• I pretty much always have to link to any cephalopod items over at Pharyngula, and here's the one for this week.
  
• Great recent Mideast piece at the Baltimore Sun. A choice quote:
  

  
  ... those blunders were the product of the neoconservative mindset, which habitually confuses what is desirable with what is doable. Neoconservatives also imagine that having a moral cause for war is the same thing as having a feasible plan.
  

  
  
• Pluto: Still sort of a planet! Huh.
  
• A post about being a kid and watching Night of the Living Dead in the theater, and being scared shitless for weeks afterwards. Eek!
  
• Skulls on a train!
  
• A site devoted to movies in the public domain
  

Dubious Linkage

A hodgepodge of stuff I ran across over the last couple of days, since I'm too damn busy to sit down and write anything original right now. It's either this, or complain about work. Or, I guess, just not blog for a few days, but honestly, is that really an option? I don't think so. It would probably be very bad not to blog for a few days. I'm not sure why, but I just think bad stuff would happen, and I'm not inclined to investigate further. So here goes:

• xkcd makes math exciting... with velociraptors!
  
• Pluto: Still a planet! Yay!
  
• A post about a weird fundie graphic novel(!) about dinosaurs attacking Noah's Ark(!!!).
  
• An IBM article about mashups
  
• K5 takes a closer look at all that AOL user data the company released recently. It's a rare tech story indeed where just reading it makes you feel dirty, and yet you can't stop. "Hypnotic slave training"!? WTF!?
  
• A roundup of creepy products at Feministing
  
• More proof of the innate superiority of left-handers, as if more was needed.
  
• Jack Bog's cat is a he. Warning, includes cute cat photo. Awwwww....
  
• The Portland Mercury offers a weird video of cats wrestling It's art. You know it's art, because it's b+w, it's in slo-mo, and there's New Age music.
  
• A weird and creepy story about the Toxoplasma parasite, which you can catch from your cat. And then it controls your mind. Seriously.
  
• A gibbon beating up a couple of tigers. You must watch this. Gibbons rock.
  
• What is it about horse meat that freaks Americans out so much? A local French restaurant offers a "hamburger a cheval" along with other delicacies like foie gras. I may have to go have me a horse burger, just to be contrary.
  
• Check out this Hello Vader costume. Looks like someone thought of it before you did.
  
• A piece about mermaid mummies in Japan.
  
• Genetically modified golf course grass, right here in Oregon. Yeah, great, now they're endangering the environment in the name of greener golf courses. Fabulous.
  
• Got a search hit for my recent Reservoir 3 post, someone searching for "pictures of fenced reservoir". It's sometimes interesting to follow the search URL and see what else is out there. Here's a cool photo of McMillan Reservoir in DC, a trail around Crystal Springs Reservoir south of San Francisco, Lafayette Reservoir near Lamorina, CA (look for the photo of the weird tower rising out of the water at an odd angle.), the snowmaking reservoir up in Whistler, BC, and the Waianae Mountains on Oahu, Hawaii.
  
• Perhaps you already knew this, and perhaps I look silly for not knowing, but I just discovered that the Multnomah County Library offers full-text search on The Oregonian, all the way back to mid-1987. Coolness.
  
• The city wants to put parking meters on Hawthorne now. And by "parking meter" I mean those Euro-licious but impossibly complex green solar-powered kiosk thingys they've planted all over downtown the last few years.
  
• Big party up at the Port of Portland's Terminal 6 on Aug.26th, with real live pirate music and everything, plus you can learn about container ships. Family fun for the whole family.
  
• Like pirates? Loathe "family fun"? Here's a recent B movie about pirates I came across on Netflix, called (naturally) "Pirates". The peculiar thing is that it's apparently a cut-down, video-store-friendly, R-rated version of what was originally an X-rated movie, with CG pirate ships, skeletons, and so on. I wouldn't say the acting's great, but the thing's actually pretty funny in parts. Weirdness.
  
• Speaking of B movies, is Nathan Fillion the next Bruce Campbell? Personally I think the lead guy in that Pirates movie would be a good next Bruce Campbell, but I imagine he's probably satisfied with his existing career.
  
• A creepy religious story about a homicidal wingnut priest.
  

---

Three sites that've linked here recently:

• The Brew Site, linking to my humble OBF piece.
  
• Blogging Brande, linking to my recent bit about Kelly Butte Park.
  
• alt.portland mentioned my take on the vile "Essential Forces" fountain over at the Rose Quarter.
  

---

And now, the latest and greatest (or not) batch of "Next Blog" referral pages. I'm tired of explaining the rationale for this, so go find one of my previous "Next Blog" posts if you're curious.

• redplanet
  
• Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for WAR
  
• Banter Man
  
• The Sartorialist
  
• Yacin the Faun
  
• Detroit Girl at Heart
  
• Economic Theorist
  
• The Internet's Park
  
  
• Southington Live
  
• Hotel Guide India
  
• .kipp'site Photoblog from somewhere in India.
  
• Marketinvest, by a marketing guy in Ho Chi Minh City
  
• il0veu
  
• Mixter's Mix
  
• BadBeatsAndCallingStations
  
• First Print Music Box
  
• Pintessentially Me
  
  NSFW
  
• Hopsakee NSFW.
  
• Sin Blog. Also NSFW.
  
• Everybody loves Cenk & Cihan. Again, NSFW.
  
• Ass Planet 50 Souvenir Program
  
  Religious
  
• Laudator Temporis Acti
  
• Eucharist Matters
  
• I'm a Jewish Princess!!! Get me out of here!!!
  
  Foreign language
  
• Buscando el Ser
  
• Berdades Da Boca P'ra Fora
  
• Blog von Oglinho
  
• Spiderman 3
  
• schizosabotage
  
• the HHK
  

2 for Tuesday

A couple more pics, for the enjoyment of my vast global audience out there on the interwebs. I've been busy in RL today, tracking down a fun sockets + threads + memory leakage bug, so I haven't had much time to think about blogging.

You probably won't care about this, but my job has been made immeasurably more difficult because the Beast of Redmond tweaked Windows' debug symbol format as part of the move to WinXP & Visual Studio.NET, so if you're still standardized on VC6 (as I sadly am), and you're hoping to get meaningful stack trace info when your app blows chunks, well, sorry sucka, you're just plain out of luck. Bastards.

I mention that mostly to explain why I don't have any topics prepared today. Fortunately I do have a couple of decent photos I figured people might enjoy. I say fortunately because blogging is a great way to relax while you're sitting around waiting for your stupid program to crash again.

So the top photo is of an interesting flower I ran across on my way to work this morning. Don't ask me what it is, though, because I have absolutely no idea.



This is a "clever" shot of the bamboo outside the trendy Saucebox restaurant (also see here), in downtown PDX.

I was planning to go take some pics of the ridiculous palm trees they're planting on Davis and Flanders between 3rd and 4th, over in our city's tiny, crime-ridden "Chinatown". I keep meaning to do that, because it just looks so damn silly having palm trees here. Maybe I'll hold off and wait until November. I imagine the poor stubby little things will look really sad and pathetic during one of our chilly autumn downpours. We're told they're called Chinese Windmill Palms, and they're supposed to be able to survive in our climate, so far as anybody knows. Yes, this is another bright idea from the PDC. The idea is they're creating "festival streets", so the neighborhood's colorful ethnic folk can have their street fairs and such. As it turns out, the actual Chinese population of "Chinatown" is basically zero, and has been for several decades now. The city keeps trying to cajole people into living here, an effort that mostly involves adding one taxpayer-subsidized piece of tourist eye candy after another to the area, while doing nothing about stuff like, I dunno, crime, jobs, or housing, stuff like that. The result is sort of like Disneyland with crack dealers. Understandably, despite the city's "best" efforts, people keep moving to the 'burbs, or at least out to the area around 82nd Avenue. Sure is weird how some people refuse to follow the plan. What's the city going to do next, put up a wall to keep people in?

Maybe the PDC's just trying to atone for having bulldozed most of the city's other ethnic neighborhoods back in the 60's, or maybe they're trying to make the area attractive for the million-dollar-loft crowd, since the so-called "Asian influence" look has been awfully trendy the last few years. The look they insist on calling "Zen", as far as I can tell, is just a simple matter of not having any furniture and pretending you like it that way. Developers love this look, because it means they can make the condos extremely tiny, and sell them for triple the normal price.


Oh, lookee. My app just crashed again. Oh, well, back to the ol' salt mine. Happy, happy, happy, joy, joy, joy....

Monday Misc., 8/7/06

Detail from the building that until recently housed the Bidwell & Co. brokerage. It's been empty for some time now, several months to a year. This is alternately known as the Bank of California Building (the name used on its National Register of Historic Places listing), and the Durham & Bates Building. In the 90's, the building figured in a court case where Japanese real estate investors were defrauded, if I'm reading the court document correctly. FWIW. This isn't much of a lead story; it's just here because I thought the photo turned out ok. That's all, really.

• The new Mac Pro is out, powered by two dual-core Xeons. I've already explained to management that I really, really need one, and my morale and the quality & quantity of my work might improve if I had one. No definite answer yet on that count, although I like to think that their nervous laughter is simply the first step on the way to budgetary approval.
  
• The latest piece of the city's "HydroPark" initiative, a neighborhood get-together at the water bureau's Marigold Tank property in SW Portland. (Google map here). Like most of the new "HydroParks", I expect this is strictly of neighborhood interest, and there's no real reason to care unless you live in the area. I'm actually mentioning this item only because "Marigold Tank" would be a great name for a band.
  
• In a related item, I was up on Alberta St. the other day, and stumbled across a similar facility, with a gigantic, vaguely nuclear-looking water tank, and a small community garden and playground on one side. (Satellite photo here, and here's another photo of the area.) Seems the garden's quite popular, actually -- this PDF from the city indicates there's a 5 year waiting list for the right to grow your veggies there. Wow. Must have amazing soil or something. And I assume irrigation isn't a problem.
  
• Also from the gov't, here's a current list of the city's most dangerous intersections. The lesson here, I think, is to avoid travelling east of 82nd Ave. at all costs. I'm not sure it's possible to get anywhere out there without passing through a handful of the dangerous intersections on the list. Surprisingly, the nightmare intersection of Burnside, Sandy, and the 11th/12th avenue couplet comes in way down at #329. The traffic circle at 39th & Glisan is also lower than you'd expect, in 257th place. Go figure.
  

On my way to work this morning, I was treated to the spectacle of a shiny new Ferrari being towed away. I don't know the story behind this. Maybe the owner's a major Colombian drug lord, and got busted at the 5th Ave. Suites this morning. Or maybe it's just some random rich person who thought that basic traffic laws don't apply if you're in a red Italian sports car. Or maybe the car just broke down and needed to be towed to the shop, for all I know. That wouldn't be entirely surprising. Ahh, sweet, sweet schadenfreude...



A photo from the annual Hermiston Melon event in Pioneer Courthouse Square. I didn't stick around for the ceremonial handing-out-of-melons.

• Seen on Pharyngula: Science. It works, bitches.
• Jalpuna! fills us in on the latest twist on dissing Hummers. Frankly, you will never, ever catch me on video doing the deed with a Humvee. It's been in bed with the oil companies. Think of all the nasty diseases you could catch. And even if you don't, the video will be perfect blackmail material.
  
• The latest Cassini goodness, this time about Saturn's weird-ass moon Hyperion.
  

Oh, and here's a photo of the West Hills from back in March when we had a bit of snow. Just a little reminder that the current warm weather is an aberration, and that most of the year it's cold and miserable outside in this part of the world. Like I always say, if you'll miss it when it's gone, don't complain about it when it's here. Although a day of snow would be awfully nice at the moment, I have to admit.

Bones and Brew 2006

Stopped by the Bones & Brew festival near the Rogue pub on Sunday. Had a few good beers and some tasty, tasty ribs, including the ones pictured above (from Sellwood Public House).

I don't want to be negative here, but I have to say the event as a whole was, um, not of the top rank. It's not the organizers' fault it was so hot and windy yesterday, but they could've provided more seating, and a tent for a little shade, and they didn't, and they're lucky there wasn't much of a crowd. There were a lot of empty spaces where vendors ought to have been, and the whole thing had a sort of empty, forlorn feel (which made the lack of seating all the more weird.) There was musical entertainment by a cover band playing classic rock hits of the 70's, 80's and 90's, far too loud, almost drowning out the roar of the I-405 freeway right next door. My senses of taste and smell had a grand old time, but the other three were under serious assault. I stayed just long enough to have my fill of bones and brewskis, and then headed off to seek air conditioning.

On the other hand, any day that includes ribs is a good day. Yesterday I discovered that a day is also a good day if it includes the IPA from the new Ninkasi brewery in Eugene. Mmmm, hoppy...

Here are a couple of posts about last year's Bones & Brew, one at Metroblogging Portland and a very negative one at ExtraMSG. The latter is a local "foodie" blog, and the writer focuses exclusively on the food and doesn't mention the beer at all, which just isn't right. It's fair to say that Portland is not, and never will be, a center of the BBQ arts. The conditions aren't right for it. I could go off on a rant and try to explain why it's impossible, but instead I'll just give one example. Some of the best barbecue I've ever had was in Columbia, SC, at a local institution called Maurice's. If you peek at the website, you'll quickly realize that Maurice is a deeply opinionated man, and about as politically incorrect as you can possibly imagine. Here he'd cause angry letters to the editor, and attract protesters, and eventually be run out of town on a rail, because people here are not about to overlook such things in the name of a good meal. That's just not our way. A genuine BBQ joint with an uncontroversial owner wouldn't fare much better. Chances are it wouldn't be located in a trendy upscale shopping area, and therefore would be widely ignored by nearly everyone who (supposedly) matters in the local food scene, other than our fairly small corps of diehard BBQ junkies. Then one day the neighborhood will become trendy overnight, and the restaurant will be run out of town by the forces of gentrification, to make way for yet another doggie day spa.

But hey, no city can, or should, be tops in every last category. We can specialize in tasty beer, and Memphis can specialize in tasty pig meat, and it's all good. That's what tourism's for.

Anyway, all of this is making me really hungry. I think I need to go find me some more ribs.

a (somewhat) brief program note

I've started getting comment spam again, over the last couple of weeks. Turns out that captcha/"word verification" was off, although I don't recall doing that, so I choose to blame Google for screwing that up. I've turned captchas on again, and I humbly apologize for the inconvenience, in the unlikely event you've ever felt like commenting here, and in the even more unlikely event that the captcha deterred you from commenting. Or whatever.

The most egregious spammer was/is someone who kept posting anonymous comments to randomly selected posts of mine, all of which read simply "Here are some links that I believe will be interested", with "Here" a link to various (allegedly) Austrian domains: weel.at or iover.at.

So I'm going to play the name-and-shame game again, in the hope that random spambots visiting this page might harvest so-and-so's email address and give 'em a taste of their own medicine. I mean, if the following info is 100% bogus I wouldn't be exactly surprised, but this is what I've got right now:

The WHOIS data for weel.at:

domain: weel.at
registrant: DM2389844-NICAT
admin-c: HT2389845-NICAT
tech-c: ESA2389846-NICAT
zone-c: ESA2389846-NICAT
nserver: ns1.eurodns.com
remarks: 80.92.65.2
nserver: ns2.eurodns.com
remarks: 80.92.67.140
changed: 20060725 18:26:50
source: AT-DOM

personname: Dillon Matthew
organization:
street address: 504 Skyway Rd
postal code: 38125
city: Memphis
country: USA
phone: +17430546134
e-mail: webmaster@reesellclub.net
nic-hdl: DM2389844-NICAT
changed: 20060725 18:26:49
source: AT-DOM

personname: Holeksa Tomasz
organization:
street address: ul. Ogrodowa 547
postal code: 34-382
city: Wieprz
country: Poland
phone: +48601822577
e-mail: tomasz@holeksa.com
nic-hdl: HT2389845-NICAT
changed: 20060725 18:26:49
source: AT-DOM

personname: Goubet Pierre-Yves
organization: EuroDNS S.A.
street address: 41, z.a Am Bann
postal code: L-3372
city: Leudelange
country: Luxembourg
nic-hdl: ESA2389846-NICAT
changed: 20060725 18:26:49
source: AT-DOM

A bit of googling indicates the Memphis TN address is bogus, and the associated ph# is obviously bogus as well, since US phone prefixes never start with zeroes, and there's no such thing as area code 743.

The WHOIS info for iover.at:

domain: iover.at
registrant: OB2389808-NICAT
admin-c: HT2389809-NICAT
tech-c: ESA2389810-NICAT
zone-c: ESA2389810-NICAT
nserver: ns1.eurodns.com
remarks: 80.92.65.2
nserver: ns2.eurodns.com
remarks: 80.92.67.140
changed: 20060725 18:18:47
source: AT-DOM

personname: Oddie Benjamin
organization:
street address: 778 Hill Road
postal code: 75224
city: Dallas
country: USA
phone: +12462031534
e-mail: webmaster@reesellclub.net
nic-hdl: OB2389808-NICAT
changed: 20060725 18:18:46
source: AT-DOM

personname: Holeksa Tomasz
organization:
street address: ul. Ogrodowa 547
postal code: 34-382
city: Wieprz
country: Poland
phone: +48601822577
e-mail: tomasz@holeksa.com
nic-hdl: HT2389809-NICAT
changed: 20060725 18:18:47
source: AT-DOM

personname: Goubet Pierre-Yves
organization: EuroDNS S.A.
street address: 41, z.a Am Bann
postal code: L-3372
city: Leudelange
country: Luxembourg
nic-hdl: ESA2389810-NICAT
changed: 20060725 18:18:47
source: AT-DOM

A traceroute shows both domains hosted under dllstx5.theplanet.com, and I'm guessing "dllstx" means Dallas, Texas. The "778 Hill Road" address listed in Dallas appears to be bogus, and there's no area code 246, in Texas or elsewhere.

So let's pursue the domains listed by the contacts listed above. Here's the info for resellclub.net, such as it is:

Registrant:
Contactprivacy.com
96 Mowat Ave
Toronto, ON M6K 3M1
CA

Domain name: RESELLCLUB.NET

Administrative Contact:
contactprivacy.com, resellclub.net@contactprivacy.com
96 Mowat Ave
Toronto, ON M6K 3M1
CA
+1.4165385457
Technical Contact:
contactprivacy.com, resellclub.net@contactprivacy.com
96 Mowat Ave
Toronto, ON M6K 3M1
CA
+1.4165385457

Registration Service Provider:
Tucows.com CO, tucowspark@tucows.com
416-535-0123

Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.
Record last updated on 08-Mar-2006.
Record expires on 28-Jan-2007.
Record created on 28-Jan-2005.

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.RENEWYOURNAME.NET 216.40.33.30
NS2.RENEWYOURNAME.NET 216.40.33.35

Resellclub appears to be using an IP address somewhere in Canada, perhaps, although this is not 100% certain.

Here's the info for holeksa.com:

DOMAIN: HOLEKSA.COM

RSP: Az.pl s.j. Albert Jerka, Andrzej Kostrzewa
URL: http://www.az.pl

created-date: 2005-10-03
updated-date: 2005-10-03
registration-expiration-date: 2006-10-03

owner-contact: P-TFH95
owner-fname: Tomasz
owner-lname: Holeksa
owner-street: Ogrodowa 547
owner-city: Wieprz
owner-zip: 34-382
owner-country: PL
owner-phone: +48.601822577
owner-email: naytro@poczta.fm

admin-contact: P-TFH95
admin-fname: Tomasz
admin-lname: Holeksa
admin-street: Ogrodowa 547
admin-city: Wieprz
admin-zip: 34-382
admin-country: PL
admin-phone: +48.601822577
admin-email: naytro@poczta.fm

tech-contact: P-TFH95
tech-fname: Tomasz
tech-lname: Holeksa
tech-street: Ogrodowa 547
tech-city: Wieprz
tech-zip: 34-382
tech-country: PL
tech-phone: +48.601822577
tech-email: naytro@poczta.fm

billing-contact: P-TFH95
billing-fname: Tomasz
billing-lname: Holeksa
billing-street: Ogrodowa 547
billing-city: Wieprz
billing-zip: 34-382
billing-country: PL
billing-phone: +48.601822577
billing-email: naytro@poczta.fm

nameserver: ns1.itcg.pl
nameserver: ns2.itcg.pl

Pozcta.FM is just a web-based email outfit a la Hotmail, so that's a bit of a dead end, too.

So we may be out of luck this time, but let's try to make lemonade out of lemons if we can. There is a Wieprz in Poland. It's not clear there's a town by that name, but at least there's a river, and a general vicinity by that name, and if you read Polish you can learn all about it at wieprz.pl (with some very nice photos, even if you don't read Polish). Seems like a very nice place, if the pictures are any indication.

The little town of Leudelange (or Leideleng), really exists too, in the deep south of Luxembourg. The town's official website is here. Again, seems like a very nice little village.

My hope here, and I admit it's a rather dim one, is that the authorities in either or both towns will somehow come across this post, realize that I'm encouraging my vast readership to visit their towns and spend lots of money. (Which I'm totally doing here: If you visit either town, be sure to spend lots and lots of money.) In undying gratitude, the local authorities track down the offending malefactors, and do whatever it is the EU does to evil criminal spammer masterminds these days. Perhaps secretly "rendering" them off to Guantanamo or something, which would be ok, naturally. I mean, they're spammers. They're barely even human. Once that's done, said authorities would let me know all about it, so I can have that all-important feeling of closure, and some fun fresh material to post here as well.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I've turned word verification on, and I'm sorry, and I may turn it off again if I think the spamstorm has passed, but I'm not making any promises just now.

---

I've also gotten broken-English spam advertising the business-portal.ws and games-center.ws domains. This spammer was a little smarter and registered both domains via Domains by Proxy, so it's hard to tell who's behind this. A traceroute doesn't reveal much of anything useful either. Bastards. Like I've said before, it amazes me that doing everything possible to hide from your potential customers is a viable business strategy. I guess it only takes one gullible bozo with a valid credit card to pay for the whole thing, but still. What a ridiculous business to be in.

My First Thursday

I was talked into doing the First Thursday thing last night, which is unusual for me. I figured the only way to really get into the spirit of the thing was to take lots of pseudo-artsy photos, while also drinking far too much. This post is the result.



This is not a gallery exhibit. It's the men's room at the Tugboat brewpub. We could argue about whether this toilet seat is art or not. It's obviously been "signed" by lots of people, although it's unlikely that Marcel Duchamp was among them. This photo, however, is art, apparently.

We've barely started with photos, but this may be a good spot to take a timeout and actually talk about the art for a moment. Our first stop after Tugboat was the Butters Gallery in Old Town. I was still taking notes on the Blackberry at this point, so I can report that I enjoyed several of the paintings by Sonia Kasparian, and the glassworks by Janis Miltenberger. Other visitors weren't so sure. I overheard a woman looking at a price tag and telling her daughter "I could buy a new cello for that". So apparently cellos are expensive as well, something I was not previously aware of. Also overheard, one man greeting another with "What up, dog? Can I get you a merlot or something?" Seriously.

My notes also mention a visit to the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, where much floor space was devoted to sculpture by Lee Kelly, one of the minds behind Leland One, a.k.a. Rusting Chunks No. 5. His stuff has the same basic look all these years later, but at least he's working in stainless steel and bronze now, which makes a big difference. It's the rust that offends the eye and the soul. I admit I may be biased here. As a longtime British car owner, the mere sight of rust fills me with horror and dread, and Leland One can aptly be described as "a hell of a lot of rust".

Another recent twist, apparently, is to weld "artsy" words and phrases onto the sides of the sculptures, which I don't think adds a great deal to the overall effect.

There was also exactly one object I liked at the Pulliam Deffenbaugh gallery, a small sculpture called Black Flame, by Peter Millett. At first I thought it might be by the same guy who did Columbia River Crystal, but it isn't.

There was some other stuff I liked too, but I'd quit taking notes, and now I don't recall what else I liked. My wife mentioned I looked like a total doofus tapping away on the Blackberry, so I stopped, because I knew she was right. So anyway, back to the photos:



The art marketplace lining 13th Avenue, with people milling about doing the art-walk thing.



Another sidewalk scene, a few blocks and a few drinks further on in the evening. In case it wasn't obvious.

It was actually kind of tough getting people to talk to me, even after all that booze. I happened to be wearing a ratty old t-shirt for an obscure minor-league hockey team, and I don't think people knew what to do with me. If this had been, say, the Last Thursday event up on Alberta St., I think people would've assumed I was being a trendsetting ironic hipster, and at the subsequent month's event everyone would have a t-shirt just like it. In the Pearl, it just made people nervous. They couldn't place me. Maybe I was a construction worker who just wandered in to load up on free cheese cubes. Maybe I was a rube from Gresham, wandering around lost here in the city's cultural heartland, not getting any of it. Or maybe I was the artist who painted the piece they were just about to make an ignorant comment about. I don't know how many times I got a very obvious once-over: Look at the face, look at the chest, look back at the face, look confused, look away. I suppose the bit with people's eyes constantly flicking down to chest level is something women deal with all the time.

The funny part is that I only had this shirt on because it's what I wore to the office that day. And I wasn't wearing it just to be ironic, either. People just don't seem to get me, so much of the time.



A passion flower, in the shrubbery between two galleries. I was actually trying to take a normal, non-blurry photo, but it was windy. I think it still turned out ok though. It's hard to take a bad photo of one of these.



Detail of one of the underground garage entrances at the Big Pink building.



A dog, happily ignoring the art frenzy occurring all around it.



A black and white photo of a Vespa, in the Pearl District, on First Thursday. You can't get much more artsy than this. Really, someone ought to give me a big pile of money for this photo. Also, I should be famous.



The human brain is wired to see faces everywhere, including in this gas meter. This pic was actually taken a few days earlier, but it's attached to a building containing an art gallery (IIRC), so it sort of fits here. Now, I understand that pictures of things that look kinda like faces are officially "cutesy" and therefore Not Real Art, but there's also a lot of money to be made pandering to the Thomas Kinkade crowd. Let's not ignore that point here. Also, I really loved the work Kinkade did on Ralph Bakshi's Fire and Ice. I'm totally serious about that.



A ghost ad on the side of an old warehouse building on 13th, now filled with ultra-ritzy condos. Mmmmm.... Bacon.....



A beautiful but decommissioned marble drinking fountain in the basement of some old building we were in, at some point late in the evening. It's somewhere downtown, I know that much. Beyond that, it's anyone's guess, and I don't recall why we were there, even.



At Aura. We ended up here after the galleries closed for the evening. Like most things in Portland, they close surprisingly early, and then there's nothing to do but go find another drink somewhere. The disco ball's going, the R&B's playing, and nobody's dancing. I think it was just too early in the evening yet. We left before it was even midnight, and the place was starting to fill in as we left. Food's pretty good, and their cilantro martini is far tastier than you might think. If you're like me, you don't spend a lot of time thinking about cilantro, but it consistently shows up in various favorite dishes of mine (like bánh mì and khao soi) , so I guess I must be a huge fan of it, apparently.

Anyway, I'm not really into trendy clubs, and I'm not useful on the dance floor, but I had a good time here. It felt, somehow, like we'd left Portland. Maybe it was the smooth R&B music, or the majority black audience, or the feeling of velvet-rope exclusiveness. I would expect to see this in Atlanta, or maybe DC, but here it's surprising. Despite the sleek, upscale modern decor, the club wasn't pulling in a lot of First Thursday types this evening. Oh, well. More tasty miniburgers for me, that way.



The candle on our table at Aura. Yes, this was taken after drinking the cilantro martini, in case you were wondering.

a racial incident

Before I even get to the bus stop, I see the angry drunk woman in the street, staggering around, muttering to herself. Late 30's, maybe early 40's, stringy dishwater hair, white tank top. I immediately think "trailer trash" and try to ignore her. I don't know anyone's name here, so let's call her "Crystal".

There's a black couple at the crosswalk, waiting for the light. Crystal sees them, staggers over, and says something I can't hear. She repeats it a couple of times, and I still can't hear the words, but by the outraged reaction she's getting it isn't anything good.

The black woman angrily tells Crystal to never call her the n-word again, or else, while the man swings his arm around theatrically and dares her to say the word again. There's a bit of milling around as Crystal puts some space between herself and the couple, and keeps taunting them.

There are maybe 5-10 other people waiting for the bus here, including me. Everyone averts their eyes. Nobody says a word. The guy's pretty angry at this point and says something about us all being a bunch of slaveowners. Actually we're just Portlanders, and we don't want to get involved. I'm certain that if everyone involved was white, or black, or green, we'd react the same way. Have a loud argument in public about anything and we edge away nervously, just in case it gets ugly. We just don't want to get involved. With anyone, for any reason. Period.

Just then, the bus arrives, and I scurry to get on board, and I'm not alone. Crystal makes a break for the bus, but the woman intercepts her and slugs her in the face. By the time she gets on board, Crystal has a split lip that's bleeding all over the place. The bus driver hassles her until she takes a paper towel to stop the bleeding. He doesn't radio it in, which surprises me. I don't think he wants to get involved either. More than once he suggests she might want to get off the bus so she doesn't bleed all over everything.

Crystal sits up near the driver, and she's near tears, whining about how the [epithet] hit her in the face. I can't help but wonder what she thought was going to happen when she decided to use that kind of language. Was she expecting flowers? She tries to plead her case with the driver, one point admitting she started it, saying she called them the n-word because that's what they are. We all scoot back a few seats, because we're Portlanders, and we really, really don't want to get involved in this. We totally disapprove, of course, we just want to avoid personal involvement, inconvenience, danger, crazy wingnuts spewing scary bodily fluids, and so forth.

About ten blocks down the street Crystal decides to get off and transfer to another bus. Before we pull away, we see her standing on the sidewalk, nursing her lip. Just then, a bike flashes by on the sidewalk. I don't get a good look, since the rider was going really fast, but I could tell that he or she had a distinctly dark complexion. Crystal notices too, and hollers something at the receding rider, who is probably already out of earshot. She notices a bearded hipster guy at the bus stop visibly cringing as she keeps shouting at the cyclist. Which suggests that she's not angry about the whole riding-on-the-sidewalk thing. As the bus pulls away, Crystal is staggering over to hipster guy, wanting to have a chat about something or other.

Later on I think of a few choice lines I could have said to Crystal if we were in some other city where people speak up, and I was quicker on the draw. Something along the lines of "Go back to Idaho, you fat Nazi bitch", a line which is absolutely full of stereotypes of its own, but hey. I don't want to fight, I'm not a fighter by nature, but if I have to, I don't fight fair, or so I keep telling myself. Somehow that policy never actually gets tested in real life. Which is fine by me, really. I also consider tossing in an Ann Coulter reference, something like "I didn't know she was in town", but I expect that would've been way over Crystal's head, and most of the bystanders wouldn't have gotten it either. Which is a real shame.

We could speculate about what would cause someone to wander around town, drunk out of her mind, screaming at people. What's the underlying cause of her unhappiness? What's she really reacting to? There may be a really sad story behind all this. I just can't bring myself to take an interest, though. Maybe it's unkind and unfair that I won't offer a drop of sympathy to people who say stupid bigoted crap when they're drunk, but there you have it.

Before I get home, I've already decided to blog about the incident. It won't make the evening news, and there may not even be a police report about all of this, but I saw what I saw, and I want there to be a record of it. Bigotry still exists, right now in the 21st century, right here in the heart of ultra-PC hippie granolaville. We'd like to think it doesn't happen here, but it does. I think it's telling that all of those insults I belatedly thought up were variations on "leave here and go back where you belong", implying she can't possibly be from here. And if she is from here, she's got to be from the wrong side of 82nd, and from the wrong social class, one of those people we all knew were beneath contempt even before today's incident.

As you might have heard, Portland is the whitest, least ethnically diverse major city in the country. The city's black community is tiny compared to most cities, and getting whiter every day, as less affluent people of all colors are rapidly being pushed out to the bad parts of the 'burbs (Rockwood, Aloha, etc.) by the city's galloping gentrification. There aren't any black neighborhoods anywhere near downtown, and there seems to be a prevalent notion that anyone who looks "ghetto" has no business on this side of the river. This is not strictly a racial thing. If you're dressed well, nobody will bat an eye no matter what you look like. But walk down the street in the latest BET fashions, and conventional wisdom says you're here to buy or sell drugs. Stagger down the street with stringy dishwater hair and a white tank top, spewing the n-word, and people won't think you belong downtown either. Some people will even name you "Crystal", a name which has distinctly poor-white-trash connotations in this part of the world. I think it's fair to say that hardcore racial or religious bigots are a small minority here, but as for the city as a whole, it's prejudiced against poor people, all poor people, of all shapes, sizes, and colors.

I'm absolutely not immune to that tendency. When I see a bunch of guys lounging around on the bus mall with baggy pants, baseball caps at weird angles, talking loudly, hip-hop blaring, not waiting for a bus, I inevitably draw certain stereotypical conclusions. When I see a huge dirty pickup truck with a Bush-Cheney sticker and a Jesus fish on the back driving around downtown, I also draw certain stereotypical conclusions. When I see an elderly homeless guy passed out on a park bench with a brown paper bag, yes, I draw certain stereotypical conclusions. When I see bands of street kids with their pit bulls blocking the sidewalk and begging for spare change, I draw all sorts of negative conclusions. In all these cases, I admit I find myself wishing deep down that they weren't here and I didn't have to look at them. On the other hand, if everyone needed the permission and approval of middle-class professional white guys just in order to exist and go where they pleased, this would be a terrible world indeed.

I don't want this to sound like a grade-school lecture here. The human brain is probably wired up to look at unfamiliar people, categorize them quickly, and draw conclusions about them, and sometimes those conclusions are going to be negative. It's probably been that way since we all lived in caves and swung around on vines, and members of other tribes were a constant mortal danger. All you can really do, all anyone can do, is recognize your own stereotypes, understand them, accept the fact that you have them, and try to get past them and do the right thing anyway. Or at least not do the wrong thing. At least think things through a little and not act on your base impulses and let them rule you. At least have the sense and decency not to act on those impulses, at least know when to bite your tongue and STFU already, even if you really do sincerely believe those crazy notions of yours with all your heart. Just shut up, already, it's easier than you think.

What I'm concerned with is how to have a reasonably humane society without insisting that everyone be perfect angels and go around thinking only good happy, societally-approved thoughts all the time. That Utopia will never arrive. As my wife always says, the mind is free. Uncontrollable, and free to think anything, at any time, and not have to answer to anyone for it, no matter how socially unacceptable, no matter how deeply irresponsible it might be. As a society we encourage people to "let it all hang out", and encourage people to say and act on any old notions they might have, in a misguided quest for honesty. This can only work if you then try to police people's thoughts and weed out antisocial ideas. You end up with a PC version of the old religious idea that thinking sinful thoughts is exactly as bad as going out and actually committing the sin. This is unreasonable, and unworkable. Crystal, above, tried to justify her verbal assault by saying "because that's what they are", in other words it was ok for her to say those things because they corresponded directly with her personal opinion, so she was just being honest.

Impulse control is one of the very few things that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Call it "being repressed" if you like, complain we already have too much of this if you want to, but I call it freedom, the inner freedom to think whatever you like without being afraid or ashamed of it or being obligated to act on those thoughts; and the inner freedom to choose exactly what you want the outside world to see, or not see. So you see, it really is OK to just shut up already, and not breathe another word about your nutty ideas. I'm not going to tell you what to think, and nobody should ever try. But just for chrissakes shut up about it already, dammit.