Noise in the Shape of Writing

This is how it works: Comment on this entry and I will give you a letter. Write ten words beginning with that letter in your journal, including an explanation what the word means to you and why, and then pass out letters to those who want to play along.

I got 'B' from essentialsaltes


1. Breakbeats
I'm listening to them right now. You know that part where a techno beat goes all funky and refuses to stick to a predictable 4/4 rhythm? It's all "boom-chika boom-chika boo-b-boo-chk-chk-chika"? Scares most people off the dance floor. Makes me a happy camper.

2. Boardgames
Oh lordy. I dream in 2D. Folding laminated, 2D, pressed chipboard goodness. I have a phrase: "We play boardgames. You know, like Monopoly and Stratego. But not those; stuff you've never heard of. Stuff you never even dreamed existed."

3. Britain
If I left America, guess where I'd go. Someplace where the Guinness flows freely. But not too close to the springhead of Guinness cause there's wacky religous fanatics there. Someplace with a good curry and chocolate bars with names like "Violet Crumble" and "Turkish Delight."

4. Bananas
My fruit of choice by a long shot. But I like them almost green. Too yellow and I will gag. God I hate ripe bananas. Torture me sometime with them if you need a weapon.

5. Benny
Mr. Hill colored my early teen years. Made me very naughty. Okay, maybe I was already very naughty. But he showed me that you can be very naughty well into your golden years. What an on-your-sleeve, out-in-public perv he was. Though apparently very shy in real life.

6. Beef
I love beef! But I am torn. In recent years I have begun loving it cooked less than I used to. I reached medium rare this year, down from a firm "well done" in my teen years. Oh, it's soooo yummy. But I am torn because my daughter is very much against meat eating... especially beef. If there was a "slaughterhouse rescue zoo" in the area I would totally go there as a family and permanently avert my psyche from ever wanting meat again. Too bad they only seem to exist in upstate New York.

7. Backstage
When the lights go down and the curtain goes up I am *so* in the zone. I can see myself from above, enjoying my little role in a no-name production for some fans that would have us believe that we are gods. And for a couple hours we are. Then I go back to my day job and shore up my ongoing facade of being solely a writer. But inside I am a SUPERSTAR!

8. Battlestar
How wonderful it is when a TV show goes inside your head and takes the time to research exactly what it is you want in a sci fi show: intelligence, gravitas, humor, self awareness, humility, commitment, a willingness to go let go of hackneyed conventions. The new Battlestar Galactica is all that.

9. Blood
I faint at the sight of blood. Not all blood, just certain situations and types of bloodletting. I love horror movies. I hate ER and CSI and Interview with a Vampire, during which I needed to be revived and picked up from the floor.

10. Beer
I almost forgot to pretend that I forgot beer. But here it is. My friend. Beer. All beer. Every single beer I have ever tasted is my friend. Except Dave's Cave Creek Chili Beer. Make it go away.

Dap update: left someone totally hanging at Big News, left someone hanging on an air kiss there too (embarrasing!) but threw three decent ones later (God, who the hell invented air kisses! What an unnerving greeting! Argh!)

On to the meme:

Discovered this meme over at mearls
Too cool. OMG my musical tastes are a royal mish mash!

Here are a buncha records (and a few CDs) that are totally worn out. Some of them I have had to replace from being played too many times.

Create your own Music List @ HotFreeLayouts!

I wonder when someone will think to revise the Badger/Mushroom/Snake animation to reflect the new "Snakes on a Plane"-bashing meme. And now I'm done wondering.

But I am not done fearing my yogurt container! Anyone else out there fear their aluminum rip-off yogurt container seal? Like, in a "used to lick it til I slashed my tongue open on it and now I prefer to throw it away unlicked but secretly hate wasting all that good yogurt so I lick it fearfully anyway" way?

No dap update. And I don't count people who purposefully tease me by starting to give me dap after having read my blog. You know who you are!

Succumbing to memes and quizes again. Powerless to resist. Bored at work. A sucker for complex looking forms. And boggled by the result that I am a...

the Prankster (42% dark, 34% spontaneous, 21% vulgar)

your humor style: CLEAN | COMPLEX | LIGHT Your humor has an intellectual, even conceptual slant to it. You're not pretentious, but you're not into what some would call 'low humor' either. You'll laugh at a good dirty joke, but you definitely prefer something clever to something moist. You probably like well-thought-out pranks and/or spoofs and it's highly likely you've tried one of these things yourself. In a lot of ways, yours is the most entertaining type of humor because it's smart without being mean-spirited. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Conan O'Brian - Ashton Kutcher The 3-Variable Funny Test! - it rules - If you're interested, try my best friend's best test: The Genghis Khan Genetic Fitness Masterpiece

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 31% on darkness You scored higher than 18% on spontaneity You scored higher than 11% on vulgarity

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

(... but I actually LIKE Howard Stern!!!! ...)

Forgot one movie...

Thank You For Smoking!
Brilliant movie! I forgive it the somewhat plodding first act, which seems somewhere between a PBS documentary and a Gus van Sant movie. Once it picks up the pace and Aaron's character gets swept up in his own shannanigans, you can see the inevitable spiral begin to take place. There are a number of well-written scenes and plot turns that make it a very entertaining film. Is it insightful? Yes. Quite. More than you might think. Reviews made it sound like the film's treatment of this divisive issue would straddle the fence. In fact, it made me almost feel sorry for Aaron's character. A lot of the movie is his discusions with his 10 year old son. Those turn out to be some moving arguments. By the end, I just plain felt angry. Grrr.

Hey! I hit 100 posts last time I posted. What a milestone. Yeah right.

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Dap update: Completely avoided hand contact for a few days. Way to avoid the challenges of life!

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I recommend the following DVDs:

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
I need to watch more of these. All it took was a documentary at my (dumb) level and now I am totally up to speed. Newspaper articles about Enron that used to perplex me now make sense. Amazing what a frame of reference does! Really good movie by the way. Now I want to see these guys burn in hell.

Doom
Oh, The Rock. How the mighty have fallen. Wait, he was never mighty! Still, the movie is marnigally fun. And the scene where they do 5 minutes of first person shooting is VERY cool. Well worth the rental. Watched that segment several times.

Skeleton Key
Dumb. There's one "Sixth Sense" moment and it's hardly amazing. It's almost a dumb one. Not worth the 2 hours leading up to it.

Red Eye
Cillian Murphy is cool. Creepy cool. Actually the opening scene could have easily been the opener for a decent sappy romance movie. He's quite charming. Rachel McAdams is ... eh. Just eh. The plot points are unapologetically contrived. The herione has ample opportunities to escape her predicament and the audience is expected to play dumb. REAL dumb. The plot holes are insultingly huge. And the budget was cearly minimal and that always detracts from a movie experience (unlsess it's an indy movie).

She's the Man
Awesome! Did I saw I was going in order of increasing lameness here? Nope. This adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is superb. Laughed my ass off. Intelligent comedy. Farce really. Not too many degrees removed from Three's Company. I went expecting to see the hot-and-I-just-checked-IMDB-to-make-sure-she's-old-enough-to-say-she's-hot-hot Amanda Bynes. But what I got was a smartly written gender switchy romp. Go see it.

But first, a "Dap Update":

YESTERDAY: reverted to standard hand shake at Big News, gave one air kiss that felt relatively botch-free

TODAY: one dap with co-worker but I left him hanging on the "punch" (oops)

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Dan Piraro draws Bizarro. www.bizarro.com
You have seen it in the Sunday morning funny papers.
You have perhaps laughed at it on occasion. Mostly these days I just raise my eyebrow at it, though there was a time when I really split a gut over it.

Ah youth.

I caught his show last night (he was on right after Big News). The crowd was huge cause it was his first tour -- ever? Not sure. Anyway, there were celebs there and it was sold out, so of course I stayed in my seat after my show and snagged what would have been someone else's payed-for seat. He he!

Dan is a showman. Dan likes to beam his cartoons up on the wall for the better part of his show. I guess I should have expected that. To be fair, though, he mostly showed ones that were not used in the papers. Sacreligious ones; pornographic ones.

And of course he was shilling for his newly released book (on sale in the lobby where he was giving autographs). He also shilled for vegetarians. He did a whole 20 minutes on how bad killing animals and eating them is. It was moving... for the first 10 minutes. And funny for the first 5. That leaves 10 minutes of squirm in your seat.

I forgive him, though, cause he was for the most part very irreverent and amusing. Think Howie Mandel with an anti-carnivore, anti-Bush, anti-War message.

Okay, don't think Howie. But it WAS like that unfortunately.

Go see the Bizarro Balogna Show if you like watching 47 year old men who look younger than you do be slightly more successful than you are.

And that's arguable.

I don't like the blues, but what I heard last night swept me up and so transfixed me that I think I have seen the light.

Rodney "B.R." Millon, the lead guitarist for my cousin's band, Keith Hollis and the Po' Boyz, will some day be as infamous as BB King or Joe Satriani. I throw those names out not because I know anything about blues guitarists or know that they are two famous examples of them -- in truth, I really have no idea. But they came to mind nonetheless.

Still, B.R. Millon is *FREAKING AMAZING*!!! I didn't know I could be struck dumb like that. I want to follow this guy and see him perform wherever he goes! I can take or leave the music in general, but the way he plucked those strings was something fierce and wonderful. He just sorta grinds his jaw and closes his eyes. He's off in another world when he does his solos.

I am time stamping this right now... Thursday April 13, 2006 Pat said "BR" Millon will be famous someday and I shook his hand way back when.

I realized long ago that I have no ability in the area of dap.

But at least I know what dap is. I've known what dap is for as long as I have sucked at doing it. Which is about 4 years now.

What is it? It's that hand thing where instead of a handshake you make a fist and bop each other -- in turn -- on top of each other's fist. Used to be a "brotha" thing, but now everyone and their cracka white trash uncle does it.

How can one suck at that? It's so simple!

Here's how: when I reach in for a handshake, they hit me with a fist.

When I remember to anticipate it, I watch for the fist but don't know if I'm the "high" or "low" fist to start off with and I come in too close to middle, making a mockery of it as we do a tiny little dap that looks stupid.

If I feel confident and go low or high, they come in with a straight on (whitey style) dap. Y'know, where the fists meet head to head. Maybe they should feel like the lame one in that case, but I always feel dumb for some reason.

And then there's the "full homey shake"... or whatever it's called. The one where you go past a handshake and link thumbs, then pull back for a quick finger clasp which releases in a "snap" to be followed by the dap. I *ALWAYS* miss part of it! Sometimes I try to start with a regular handshake, which is confusing at best and just extends the embarrasment at worst. But most of the time I simply forget about the dap and that's called "leaving them hanging".

Kill me know.

Most of you who know me have figured out that I just plain go for the traditional manly handshake. Unfortunately that pegs me straightaway as being old.

Why can't we all just hug?

No, seriously. The whole handshake thing seems musty and perfunctory anway.

Don't let me get away with it next time you greet me.

Peace out.

Went back to Mt. High today.
Now, allla you being hip southlanders (or ex-southlanders), you would clearly all get the joke if I were to say "Mt. High was awesome! There was primo powder and the runs were excellent!"

Yeah. I thought so. Even for the month of April, those "runs", if you can call them that, were basically crevasses of deadly, ski-swallowing slushy ice. But, heck, if you're there with your daughter on an all-day pass, that's magically converted to 8 hours of pure bliss.

We did every beginner run and were at the threshold of doing an intermediate (on her first full say of skiing -- following last month's 4 hour beginner ski class) when we decided the sun and lines had gotten the best of us. Even after 2 heaping helpings of sun screen, the sun's penetrating and reflective power had the best of our faces and it was time to go.

I have always considered the 5 minutes of quiet time spent going up a ski lift to be one of the most transcendent moments on earth. It is even more so when spent with your daughter. Of course, talking was fun too -- and the stretches of resting were liberally punctuated with witticisms about skiers, snowboarders, and what the best choice of run combinations and moguls would be -- yet still the silences were golden.

Next time, blue squares only!
And more sunscreen.

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Back to the subject of writing techniques I deplore...
I want to air a long-standing gripe: I hate dreams!
Specifically, I hate when protagonists have dreams in books!
Drives me nuts!

We are not there to feel this dream.
We do not know if this dream contains portents (usually it does not).
This dream will not forward the story.
This dream is only interesting to the protagonist.
You cannot make this dream sequence interesting to the reader.
It is impossible because we are not in his head.
We should not be in his head except to see what he experiences and to occasionally to get a taste of his emotions regarding a subject -- emotions which need to be substantiated with actions and effects!
Dream sequences are mental circle jerks!
They accomplish nothing that a good piece of dialogue and reaction dialogue cannot more aptly portray.
I am talking to you, Jay Kay Rowwling!*
(And to many others)

Aaargh!
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*yes, I am trying to evade the blog bots' search routines

An article in a local paper relates how a park was promised to locals as a place for their kids at the adjacent elementary school to play. But the city never got around to building it. Just a long parade of excuses, and now that they are finally starting to build it (12 years later), they expect everyone to be ecstatic about the news. One parent laments that he had promised this park to his 6-year-old, who is now 18. What a waste.

Ironically, this story almost makes me sadder than the ones about children getting killed in car accidents or molested by deviants. The kids near that park were not only expecting a full life, like the crash victims and molestees, but they were also promised a place to have growing up in.

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Heading off to a benefit comedy show for a friend who was in that movie of mine. She needs emergency retinal surgery and has no insurance so the likes of Patton Oswalt (King of Queens), Bob Odenkirk (Mr Show), Louis CK (lotsa stuff), Dana Gould (Simpsons), and other medium weights are headlining at the Center for Inquiry West (CSICOP's new home... go figure... they do TONS of comedy there now). I figure since I was Bank Robber #2 and she was Female Police Officer #2, we have something in common.

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Please enjoy this modern parable on parenting and short SUV turn radii:

Pat's Chevy Tahoe commercial

Brought to you courtesy of Ranbot's random websurfing.

And please try one of your own!

I believe getting an entry in Wikipedia gets as close to immortality as I can reasonably hope for without actually expending any effort to achieve such. Yes I believe it does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewdrops_records

My little 99 Saturn SL2 is proof of a future free of dependence on oil!*

Every few months or so, it burns up all the oil in the crankcase. Or at least that's what the little dipstick tells me. I never remember to check it except when the mileage gets up to 3000 since the last maintenance, but I *KNOW* it's running on nothing long before that. I've tested it. It loses oil at an alarming rate, but it doesn't drip on the ground... it gets burned up in the engine, I guess.

And it never complains! For 170,000 miles now it's been like this (well, at least for the last 120,000 or so). And never! NEVER has there been an oil-related malady. No "Service Engine Now" light. No Engine Overheating. Well, maybe on a hot summer day stuck in traffic once or twice a year -- but nothing that opening the windows and turning the vents to HOT can't fix.

Saturns are magical little fun boxes that allow me to be stupid!

Buy a Saturn!

*(engne oil, not refined fuel oil)