Nations: gotta catch'em all!

We went to the Festival of Nations today, part of the slow exploration of our new home that K and I have undertaken. It was frankly disappointing. I'll be honest, it can take a lot for this type of festival to satisfy me. I enjoyed it, yeah, but I won't go back next year. Mostly because of the food.

Food is a crucial piece of any gathering as well as an immediate cultural identifier. A well-read or well-fed man could say that food is magic. Kirke turned Odysseus's crew into pigs with her meal; Andhrimnir cooks a feast every night for the heroes of Valhalla. Half of the reason to go to the Festival of Nations was the thirty-four food vendors, from German on one side to Brazilian on the other. Everyone knew that.

Which is why the crowd along the row of food tents was near impenetrable. Most of the time you couldn't see a menu without fighting through the lines. We managed to get some kabobs from Greece-tent and feijoada from Brazil-tent before giving up on getting anything else from the gauntlet. At three in the afternoon of the last day, when hawkers were crossing items off their menus because they had run out of food, the lines were as long at every one of the food sellers as we had seen them. There was no slackening of interest or appetite, no one rushing to the music stages or joining the circle-dancing hippies. The crowd actually seemed to grow as time went on, mocking us. They might as well have turned to us and said, "We're getting a Romanian dessert and you're not. Also, we bought all the beer at the drink tent, all they have left is Diet Coke. Chump."

I'm convinced that the crowd can be beaten. If you started early Saturday, I'm sure by Sunday afternoon you could try something from each of the sellers. Move from one line to the next, methodical, patient, inexorable, and you'll eat your way from Belize to Bosnia and Eritrea to Ethiopia. Look, not many cuisines started with E. The point is you could work your way through the food booths. And I bet that after three or four booths, the magic starts to wear off. You'd be spending as much time in line as you would eating. People who know me may not realize that I consider "completing a set" to be a holy act, but even I would grow restless working that much just to eat something wrapped in goddamn grape leaves.

The rest of the festival was dominated by textiles. Nearly everyone was selling clothes and not much else. There was a highland contingent throwing sheafs and cabers but you can't spend an entire afternoon watching bags of straw get thrown over a pole. There was an ebru painter, which was actually mesmerizing. That's exactly the kind of thing I want to watch for hours, and would have if the crowd hadn't been so thick. No shit, it's like they grabbed some flan and just followed us around the park.

We had to stop for ice cream on the way home. Had to. I almost got whiplash when I saw the sign. The logo isn't quite the same, but it's close.

More dramatic than Shakespearean gophers

Names have been changed to protect me. I may not be innocent, but I have to work with these people.

In the mail room, we sometimes have to cover the reception desk. We used to cover the receptionist, Briana, when she went to lunch, but a few weeks ago Ette, one of the (former) executive secretaries, moved to building services, next to the mail room, and took over covering the front desk. This caused some celebration in the mail room, because my coworkers Hal and Shelly hated covering reception.

Last week, Briana and Ette worked off-site destroying documents with two reps from the home office. Ette was supposed to be there for one day while Briana was going to be gone for the whole week. That would have meant Ette manning reception and Hal or Shelly covering her for lunch.

Monday Briana and Ette started an hour late because the documents had been pulled from storage. They also got a three-hour lunch, and decided they were having so much fun that Ette should stay at the off-site all week. They didn't start work on time during the project. The out-of-town reps also wanted to go sight-seeing while they were here and asked if Briana and Ette would show them around town. Neither of them had time in the evenings for it, so they told the reps it would have to be before four-thirty. One of the reps had a company car and gas card, but she told Briana to keep them both because the rep didn't know her way around town.

Hal and Shelly blew up when they heard about this. Not only did they have to cover reception all day, they were covering for people taking super-lunches and playing tour guide. Hal answered the phones with feeling, when he wasn't taking a nap and bothered to turn the phone system on. He and Shelly have both stated with feeling that Briana shouldn't ask them for any help again. I hope it's clear what feelings they have. It is primarily anger, with a pinch of spite for spice.

Because I'm still capable of having a conversation with Briana, I've found out the situation wasn't as bad as Hal and Shelly imagined. Nobody was playing tour guide. Briana had the car because the out-of-town rep told her to take it. She and Ette had a long lunch Monday and Monday only, because the off-site didn't have the documents ready; should they be expected to come back to work for an hour and drive right back? I think Shelly will get over this, but Hal is going to hold on to it until either he or Briana isn't there anymore. Probably longer.

And there's Al. Al and Sally carpool every day; Al is married, Sally is single. Both are middle-aged, kind of heavy, average people. They are probably the only two native English speakers in their department. For much longer than I've been there, Al and Sally have been watched around the office for tell-tale signs of romance or, at least, the sex. The absence of definite signals hasn't slowed the rumor mill. That changed Thursday when Hal and two people from building services were coming back from lunch, around one-thirty, and saw Al and Sally walking into the hotel two blocks from our office building. This sighting fueled nearly an hour of discussion involving everyone in and near the mail room. All the corners were dusted, from why were they walking to what were they doing, and how did they pay to what does she see in him. Hal used to work at another hotel from the same chain; he enlightened us as to their reasonable daytime rate structure, and stated there is no restaurant in that hotel.

Sociology indicates that Al and Sally walked rather than lose their parking space, that Sally paid so that Al's wife wouldn't notice the deficit, and that they had the sex. If you want to know what any woman sees in any man, you have a lot to learn about women. Meanwhile, the office is watching with bated breath.

Tomorrow an executive will be visiting our office, ostensibly to fire people. Lots of people. Possibly three digits of people. I'm taking a perverse pleasure in thinking about the shit getting stirred since we know our contract for the mail room won't be extended. We're getting kicked out, but that's five months from now, and somebody's getting booted now.

Oh, and Briana is buying food stamps from someone in maintenance. I don't know if she's paying less than face-value, but I don't think she would deal if she wasn't.

Dana

I was seven years old and ready to cross the line with her. we didn't just get in the sack, we put on rubber, there were rubbers for everyone. Thirty people, children, students, in all, plus the voyeurs. She was bound, strapped for me. I saw the grassy field and felt my anticipation grow. All the boys and girls paired off and it started. We were pumping hard from the get-go, a machine with three legs. We may have finished before the others, the watchers may have given us the prize. I don't remember much except being so close to her body, arms around shoulders, hips against hips, so excited and nervous, the pounding heart, the ragged breathing, gasping and sweating when it was over.

I write very poor poetry. Pity me and my madness.

Reunion

Right now people I went to school with
are gathered on a golf course
7 hours away
reliving four years of high school
and the ten years since.

I declined the invitation.

They are probably all wishing
that the drinks were cheaper
and that the company was better.

My drinks are cheap enough
and the company here - nobody - is fine.
We have the most interesting conversations
while I write this,
and no one is ashamed of being
in Cincinnati or the Navy
because no one at the table
is in Cincinnati or the Navy.

I'm buying a round for everyone at the table
and you, too.

Drink up.
I have avoided the company of strangers
one more time
and that is cause for celebration
even if this poem isn't.

I thought about her the entire drive home, more eager with each mile

Past the church and the steeple, the laundry on the hill
The billboards and the buildings, memories of it still
Keep calling and calling

All coffee is not created equal. Some varieties blow others away, they haunt you in the night when you can't reach them. I drank enough Dancing Goats coffee on Saturday to put a coma patient on its feet. Hey, if you had an udder full of that stuff you'd be dancing, too.

Two years since I moved away and all it took to make me feel at home was seeing a few familiar faces when I didn't expect them. I sat in front of Strawberry Fields for an hour and saw the same people I used to, employees and customers both. It was the same around town, people I knew on sight just as I had left them like shop-window mannequins. The bicyclist who had cancer. The cooks and busboys at Ihop. Champaign was like the bedroom of some abducted child whose parents won't move anything in the room in case their baby comes home. A little dusty, but essentially as I had left it. Steve told me the best story I've heard in a long time, and I'm totally going to steal it for something.

It's been proven, mathematically, that CU has the hottest women anywhere. The background hum of above-average beauty is punctuated by women that make you hear "Back in black" when they walk by. Sit downtown for any length of time and your palms will grow hair from thinking about the women on the streets or in the cafes. That's the afternoon traffic; wait until nightfall and the bar crowd hits Neil Street. You might as well call the ambulance at sunset. Earlier, if the university's in session.

The drive up to CU felt like twenty minutes instead of three hours, but the drive home seemed to last forever in all the right ways. The Divinyls and Poison on the rockbox, and Joe Cocker as I pulled up to the apartment. K wanted to tell me about the giraffes mating at the zoo. I cut her off before I got a description of the giraffe's erection; I just couldn't deal with it then. It was too much for one day, too much to stay awake through, too much to live through. I'm not sure I did.

Road trip

I broke free on a Saturday morning
Put my pedal to the floor
Headed north on Mills Avenue
Listen to the engine roar

When I go on a road trip, music is essential. My mix for years has started with "This Year," partly because I always take off on Saturday mornings, partly because I've spent the last three years telling myself that I will make it this year if it kills me. I'm packed for a drive to Champaign today. I've got three half-full notebooks, a pack and a half of smokes, a well-used card deck, and a quote from Osip Mandelstam. And this is definitely the earliest I've ever woken up to go to a coffee shop.

Rock the place.

War... War never changes.

I'm reserving judgment until I see a full version, but it's clear this isn't the Fallout I love. This mutant version might be good to newcomers, the howling interlopers at Gamestop likely to purchase one of the console releases of this irradiated abortion. Those of us who set out from Vault 13 have more refined, more esoteric tastes. Fallout and it's sequel were essentially pen-and-paper rpgs - of the first order - with single-player campaigns played on a computer, and that drew a unique crowd. Fallout began life using GURPS, for fuck's sake. There is even a translation of Fallout from the screen to its rightful place on the tabletop.

Look, when I leave my home behind to wander the radioactive waste in search of a water purification chip to save my subterranean bomb shelter, I want to do so on a hexagonal map. Should I have to engage some ne'er-do-well in combat, we would battle in a civilized fashion, each performing a limited number of actions then allowing the opponent to do the same until one of us is looting the other's bloody corpse. We would not run helter-skelter through the ruins firing at anything that moved at any time like goddamned savages. The wiki says there are action points, but from the footage I can't see how they are used. Maybe you can sell them for a bottle of Nuka-Cola.

It does have great atmosphere, and I definitely could get used to the Pip-Boy 3000. I'd like to be wrong about how disastrously this will play, I really would. I think that, like Star Wars and Indiana Jones, the gap between installments is too long now, the expectations of fans too high. Anything less than the perfect memories within our hearts will be seen as failure.

Rancid. Rotten. Rubbish.

We're the flowers in the dustbin
We're the poison in the human machine
We're the future, your future

As a rule I don't listen to the radio, but I like to catch up on what "the kids" are listening to from time to time. Especially if I'm driving a car that I can't plug my media player into. Radio has given me some great music in the past but most days it just isn't worth the time. And some days it's just fucked up.

I had the radio on last week and caught a concert promo for Rancid. If you're not familiar with them - one, you're very lucky and should buy some lotto tickets, and two, they're a ska punk band formed in '91. The ad featured two songs in the background, "Ruby Soho" and "Time Bomb," and that's just sad. I listened to those songs when I was a freshman. Over ten years later and that's the best they can do to advertise themselves? I guess they needed a way to draw the last rude boy in existence out of hiding.

I don't know what's worse, that Tim and Lars are still in a punk band or that they sold out a 1,500-person show. Some musicians can be legitimately active for twenty or thirty years, but there is a definite shelf-life on punks. When your music evokes youthful rebellion, the barbaric yawp of teenagers and new adults, and you're middle-aged, it's time to stop. Even if they were fifteen when Operation Ivy was together, they're still over thirty now. Stop. Fucking. Playing. Kids, stop encouraging them. It's the only way they'll learn.

I saw The Sex Pistols on Letterman when I was sixteen - seventeen years after Sid Vicious died, and the year after "Ruby Soho" was a single. It would have been ridiculous if I hadn't known they gave us "Holiday in the Sun" and "God Save the Queen." Johnny Rotten could have passed as a parody of punk if only he'd had more energy. It looked like he was doing a bad imitation of himself twenty years younger.

Some people are supposed to live fast and die young. Sid did it, Johnny Ramone died of prostate cancer, and Keith Richards is going to outlive our grandchildren. Who will probably be shouting "pick it up, pick it up, pick it up" on their way to a Rancid show.



No Future, no future, no future for you

We band of buggered

I heard this before I saw it, and when I looked up at the TV I wasn't upset, just... disappointed. I really have to wonder where their ad agency got the balls to use the St. Crispin's Day speech to hawk PS3s.

Internet service pimp, part II

Enough backlash finally built up that Charter has decided to stop the NebuAd rollout. I'd like to believe, given the announcement's timing, that my post had absolutely nothing to do with it.
via Ars Technica and Charter Watcher.

Microsoft publishes bullshit; also, water is wet

The news from Redmond is, as usual, ugly. Microsoft Vice President Mike Nash has published a document that's generating some talk. It seems that no one wants to run Vista and this produces a lot of hand wringing in their monolithic dungeons, so they put out a treatise on all the reasons to upgrade from Windows XP and the problems you'll have if you don't. I haven't read the propaganda, and I'm not going to, but I'm willing to bet this article is more than a bit hyperbolic.

I'm the last person to defend Microsoft, about anything, ever. I jumped ship years ago and encourage everybody I meet to do the same. I'll pay to see a George Lucas movie before I buy anything from Microsoft. At this point I won't even loot a copy of Windows; it just has nothing to offer me. Nothing good, anyway. They've dug a hole so deep it would take a Herculean effort to earn any praise, even backhanded. They can integrate some Unix principles into their OS, they can release interoperability documentation, whatever. Even when they do something right they do it wrong.

I've drawn some conclusions from some of the remarks in the Nash's whitepaper. It's no more than a reiteration of the party line: XP is old and busted, Vista is new hotness. Nash says that waiting to be upgrade leaves users vulnerable because XP and its attendant applications are outdated and "don't employ proper security safeguards." He wants you to use Vista and new applications that don't employ proper security, which you'll be reminded of with each new 0-day attack. Vista is supposedly built of sturdier stuff, making it more difficult to compromise. The comments about XP use leaving you insecure only mean that all those years they spent telling you that XP was a security paragon, they were mistaken, but new hotness Vista is really secure. Which is taking the piss. All it takes is one developer working on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon, or one user installing a new screensaver downloaded from a "respectable" website in eastern Europe.

Let's be clear: security begins and ends with the user. Only a truly insecure system - like most Windows releases to date - can be owned without user interaction. A dumb user can cause a secure system to be destroyed, and a smart user can keep an insecure system intact.

As for users who don't upgrade because mission-critical applications won't run on Vista, Nash says that they should just switch now because those apps will still be incompatible with Windows 7, due in under two years. So he wants users to be without functioning software immediately rather than have two more years to prepare for the changeover. For that matter, he wants users to shell out for an upgrade now, and do it again in two years.

The Tech Cult article seemed to be drawing conclusions about the upgrade paths from XP to Win 7, but I don't see any evidence of those threats. Maybe he actually read the whitepaper, but I'll be damned if I waste my time doing that. In either case, I can't imagine anyone buying an upgrade-only version of Windows. It's more desirable to have fresh installs on bare metal every time; if memory serves, that can only be done with the more expensive "full" packages.

Look at features missing in Vista, I'm not sure why anyone would want to upgrade. Yes, they removed Active Desktop, but they dropped useful things, too. A lot of items on the list seem like fringe features (RIP, gopher) but they also seem like Microsoft went out of their way to cull them. Customize the Windows startup sound? Create secondary actions for files in the context menu? Shutdown menu in the Task Manager? Visual progress indicators in Defrag? Not with Vista. Hell, from the way it looks, they castrated the Defrag gui: no pause, no choosing which drive to defrag. Backup won't allow you to choose which directories to archive or exclude. The list goes on. Vista isn't an operating system, it's a digital charnel house.