beautiful, funny, sad & true

When I saw that La Maison en Petits Cubes had won the Oscar for being the best animated short film, I was stunned.  Pleasantly.  I say that because I love Kunio Kato’s work, and I’ve posted some of it in my blog before.   I am SO SICK of always being ahead of my time.

That’s a joke, by the way.  My tongue was planted firmly in my cheek as I wrote that.

Here’s Part One of the video. I trust that you can find Part Two on your own.

At around 11:00 this morning, I realized that I was wearing two different types of shoes.  I know; check out the big brain on Todd.  At least they’re both Docs, though, so that’s gotta count for something.

Hilarious.

The first two Coldplay albums are two of my all-time favorites.  I haven’t been overly excited about the last couple of albums, but I got the new one this weekend, and I can’t get enough of this song. What? Don’t be a hater.

As those of you who are among my Twitter minions (or ‘Twitches’, which is the hilarious term that my friend @barrington coined) are already well aware, there is a smallish group of us at work who curtailed our usual activities in order to work in the basement.  It’s not filing, exactly, but it’s not much more difficult than that, and it’s way too boring to waste any more space describing here.

I told you all that to tell you that when you work in close quarters with people for eight hours a day, you tend to talk to each other about lots of subjects that had previously been undiscussed.  The majority of the people working downstairs are women, who either already have children or who are trying desperately to have them, so I now feel that I know way more than I ever wanted to know about dilation and labor and episiotomies and all that.

But it isn’t ALL glamorous.

We do talk about lots of other things too, and a lot of the time we enjoy being down there and it makes the day pass much faster.  I learned something interesting last week, when one of the women claimed that the ‘inner’ female reproductive system could be drawn in the shape of a cute little bunny.  I had to see this for myself, so she pulled out a pen and a sticky note pad and drew the following picture:

In order to salvage some dignity for my blog and hopefully still retain a compelling sense of mystery, I will leave the parts unnamed, but I think you get the picture.  If you don’t, uhh. . .well. . .I guess you can have your parents explain it to you or something.  This is a hilarious idea, and if I remember correctly, she did say that she used this to explain the very basics to her daughter when her daughter got to a certain age.

So there, you see?  Despite the fact that I haven’t been able to listen to any CD’s or NPR (not to mention all of the music I need to learn by St. Patrick’s Day to perform with IrishBand) for three weeks now, being in the basement has provided many opportunities to learn new and interesting things.

As I find out more, I’ll keep you posted.  You know I will.

This morning, I had a very strange and funny dream.

* * * * *

I leave my apartment and as soon as I walk outside my door, I see that my neighbors are all having a collective yard sale.  Other people in the neighborhood are contributing to this sale as well, so it’s really a huge collection of things.  I see two accordions, one on the ground and one on top of a display shelf, so I grab the one off the shelf and put it on.  I see the price tag and notice that it says ‘$1,000.00′ on it.  The accordion itself is made of cloth, and is covered with jewels.  I’ve never seen one like it before, so I try to play it, but it’s extremely difficult and, I decide, not worth the extravagant price.  I take it off and continue to walk through the sale.

As I do, I find that the sale is taking place inside a large, open room that is connected to a bookstore.  There is a coffee shop in one side, and people are sittting at little tables, reading newspapers and watching the plasma-screen television that’s on the wall.  My childhood friend Jason is there, and he tells me to “Look at this!”, and shoves a newspaper in my face.  There’s a story about global warming, and a new phenomenon called flaming glaciers down in Antarctica.  There’s a chart that reads:

GLACIERS:                                                        PERCENT:

• affected by global warming:                                 33
• mildly affected:                                                   22
• completely unaffected:                                        44
• other (flaming, etc.):                                           ??

I don’t know what to make of this ridiculous chart, so I hand the paper back to Jason, who points to the TV, where they’re showing footage of a glacier, belching smoke and steam into the air like a volcano.  I walk away and decide to go home.

[At this point in the dream, there is another scene which I can't remember well enough to recount, in which I'm sitting on a gigantic green sofa in my living room.  A young woman walks up behind the sofa and says to me, "You know James?" She has an accent, possibly Russian or eastern European.

"From work, you mean?  Yes."

She starts to cry.  "He said that you're one of his great friends, and that you should call him right away."  She walks away, sobbing.  I turn back around to where my housemate in the next room.  He looks over at me and I give him an I-don't-know-what-the-heck-that-was-about-either kind of shrug. ]

I turn on the TV to watch a movie with my friend StudioJim, who is sitting on the other end of the sofa.  I’m on the left end and he’s on the right.  The movie starts.  “Man, it’s really cold in here,” he says.

“It’s fine on this end.  We should totally switch.”  We don’t move, but continue to stare at the screen.  I start to nod off.

“Hey,” he says again.  “You really want to switch ends?”

“Oh. . .yeah. . .sorry, must’ve dozed off a little.  Yeah, let’s switch.”  We still don’t move.

Finally I get up and go to my room.  I go to bed, and just as I’m about to turn off the light, Housemate does something that my brother used to do when we were little (and which I’d completely forgotten about).  He walks right next to the bed and falls over sideways onto me.  Full weight.  Suddenly I see a huge transparent moth flying around the light in the kitchen, so I point at it and say to Housemate, “Uhh. . .sir. . .there’s a huge moth over there.”

He immediately jumps up, runs into the kitchen, grabs the moth, brings it back into my room and stuffs it under the covers, laughing.  I sit up and freak out, yelling, “Gah. . .what’d you do that for, you penis hole?!”

* * * * *
‘Penis hole’.  Where in the world did THAT come from?  I woke myself up laughing.

In real life, those are words that I don’t think I’ve ever heard in conjunction before, and it would have never occurred to me to put them together, but it totally makes sense somehow, and you’d better believe that I’m going to find opportunities to use that description every chance I get.  Feel free to use it too, but if you do, all I ask is that you give credit where credit is due.

Thanks.

I don’t normally like to do ‘filler’ blog entries, but I’ve been too busy to write. With all apologies for the long time gap between entries, I’m going to have to ask for your prolonged patience. This has been, and continues to be, a very busy week. In a good way.

I’ll be celebrating two birthdays tonight and tomorrow, AND rehearsing with IrishBand. Sunday I’m sleeping in and listening to This American Life, then meeting with a guy who wants me to produce one of his songs, and THEN I’m seeing a movie with a new friend.

I’ll letcha know how it all goes, and hopefully even manage to take a few pictures. It promises to be a great weekend.

Naturally, all of this Mac nostalgia made me think of the comic strip Bloom County, in which the character Oliver Wendell Jones got a computer for Christmas which had a hilarious mind of its own, and which was obviously inspired by the first Macintosh.  It was called the Banana Junior 6000.

You can click on all of these to make them large and legible, by the way.  Here are two strips, from when Oliver first got the computer. . .

. . .and here are two from some time later, when Oliver and the Banana started to feel the effects of Moore’s Law:

This was the 1980’s, after all, so there was plenty of heavy metal music in the culture at large.  Some people listened to it, some people ridiculed it, some of us even got guitars and learned how to play it.  I told you that story so I could tell you that Kiss was one of the biggest bands in the world back then (you could argue that they still are), and one of their claims to fame was definitely Gene Simmons’s tongue.  The creator of Bloom County designed a hilarious mock-advertisement for the Banana, using Gene as the negative model for what will become of your child if he or she doesn’t grow up with the necessary skills and tools to survive in this cruel and unforgiving world.  Like any good, intrepid Kiss fan, I instantly recognized it as a classic, cut it out of the newspaper, and tacked it to the wall in my bedroom.

Still rings true today, eh?

I love the name of the program ‘Bananamanager.’  That’s just pure genius.  Somehow, I suspect that’s where he got the idea for the whole Banana thing in the first place.

Incidentally, I need to give special thanks to this blog and this blog, from which I scrounged up these strips.  Without them, I would have been trying to take pictures of my old Bloom County books, which would have been a huge pain, and wouldn’t have looked nearly as good either.  My hat’s definitely off to both of them.

Apple just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh, and I thought it would be fun to scrounge up the original television ad for it, from 1984.  It’s a classic.

The ad had a bit of a resurgence in 2008, when a parody of it was used for the Obama presidential campaign.

Here’s the first real life introduction of a Macintosh computer, hosted by the ubiquitous Steve Jobs, but the Mac speaks for itself, both figuratively and literally.

Before that, in 1983, there was a super-weird industry event called the “Macintosh Dating Game,” which was emceed by Steve Jobs, and which featured three software CEO’s, two of whom have become historical also-ran’s, but one of whom is someone who you will no doubt recognize.

It’s interesting in hindsight that Apple spent so much time taking pot shots at IBM, when Microsoft was the company they should really have been paying attention to.

There’s so much more I could share about all this.  I find the early days of the personal computer industry endlessly fascinating, because that’s when it was all being born, and I was just the right age to be interested in all of it, and what’s more important for this entry, just the right age to remember and be able to share it these many years later.

Now, as back then, Macs comprise about ten percent of the market, but as Douglas Adams famously said in an ad (which I’ve so far been unable to scrounge up), “They may have only ten percent, but it’s clearly the top ten percent.”  Well said, Douglas, well said.

If you’re so inclined, here’s an interesting collection of articles called 25 Years of Macintosh for you to share and enjoy.

Happy birthday, Mac!