Ravings of a Textual Deviant

Ed’s recent ex-employer bounced Ed’s final paycheck…and unlike the others, this one did not clear on the second try. That makes three times, and that is a pattern. The dogs of law have been unleashed, and are baying for restitution…and attorney’s fees. As Ed said, “if restitution is not made within a reasonable period, we can go for the throat and let my lovely wife slake her thirst on the blood of my enemies.”

Does anyone have a good recipe for the blood of one’s enemies? Just in case, you understand.

How cold is cold, anyway? Dorothea has her own personal standard, “mean cold.” I tend to like cold weather, and have been known to say “it’s not that cold” when penguins huddle together for warmth. Today, for example, it’s about 6 degrees above zero, including wind chill, and I think it’s refreshing. I will, however, concede that it’s reasonably cold when my wet hair freezes solid within a couple of minutes of going out. (Going out with wet hair does not make you sick. Germs make you sick.) So, what tells you that it’s time to bring in the brass monkeys?

I’m a huge Janeane Garofalo fan; and I’ve never made a secret of it. After clearing a lot of stuff off my to-do list, I managed to sit down with a double feature, The Truth About Cats and Dogs and The Matchmaker.

Usually, I’m not one for romantic comedies, and The Matchmaker reminded me why. It’s painfully predictable, not very well written, and you could plug any actor or actress into any role, and have the same movie. It didn’t really make good use of Garofalo’s talent, although Dennis Leary did a good job as an unadulterated scumbag. I recognized David Kelly (Michael O’Sullivan in Waking Ned Devine) in a small supporting role, but he really didn’t have very much to work with. Skip it; you can see a better version of the same thing a dozen times over, I’m sure.

The Truth About Cats and Dogs, on the other hand, really captured my attention. Essentially, it’s a gender-role-reversed, modernized Cyrano, with Garofalo as the lead character. Unlike the Matchmaker, I cannot imagine anyone else in that part. And Uma Thurman gets to do some real acting, as opposed to standing around looking pretty, as she does in a lot of films. However, what really fascinated me was what reversing the gender roles does to the story, even in a modern setting. I found it worth watching, just for that.

Today is the anniversary of the infamous Blizzard of 1978. Indianapolis is observing the date with light snow and freezing drizzle. It’s our first snow of the season worth mentioning, and frankly, I am more concerned about the other drivers than the road conditions. The interstates were clear if not dry by the time I was out at 8:30 this morning. Neighborhood streets not so much, but more or less navigable.

Now, back in January of 1978, I was six and half years old, and my family lived in northern Indiana, and we must’ve gotten 40 inches of snow over a three-day period. I remember snowbanks higher than my head, and burrowing into the snow cliffs on either side of the driveway after my parents dug out. I expect it was a lot more fun for me than it was for them. One of the most vivid memories I have is walking home from school on the first day after it reopened. I got to the first intersection and looked down–way down–at the street. I had no idea how far down it was until I looked around for some kind of reference point and saw a metal X in the snow at about ankle height. It was the top of a street sign.

Ed and I have both been working hard to lose weight and get in shape, and last night, I had a very weird indication that it’s working. I was putting away my laundry, and a pair of jeans was missing. Not in the drawer, the hamper, the dryer, the basket…just missing. I was utterly mystified. Even went through Ed’s jeans to see if mine had accidently gotten mixed in. No luck.

Two hours later, after Ed changed for bed, he left a pair of jeans lying on the floor. I checked the label. Sure enough, he’d been wearing my pants all day. My size 12 petite pants. And he hadn’t noticed. Mind you, I’m just under 5 feet tall, and Ed’s at least nine inches in height and thirty pounds ahead of me. “Those were women’s jeans?” he asked. “I thought they were a little loose in the hips.”

I love this one!

Sum up one or more games that you GM or play in 10 words or less. (Three is best, but not everybody is that pithy.) Don?t restrict yourself to current games if you have great ones in the past.

The Grand Ellipse: Red herring, anyone everyone?

Rob’s version of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil: Fire + Insanity = Fun

Rob’s long-ago Vampire game: Undead cheerleaders rock!

Anything Eric ever ran for us: Munchkin, munchkin, munchkin

Doug’s underwater one-shot: When someone asks if you’re a god, say yes

Anything Doug runs: plot roller coaster

Dave’s Dungeon of Death from Above: Always look up

Last year’s TFOS campaign: My So-Called Alien Life

The Terrible Fate of the Orphans of St. Christopher: Undead Catholic schoolgirls in trouble

Courtesy of Cathy…

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

And France barely counts; I spent six hours in De Gaulle airport, and that’s it. Mind you, I’ve never thought that getting there was half the fun, not even when I was going someplace pretty awful…but being there is fabulous. And there are so many places I’d like to be: Iceland, Antarctica, Peru, Australia, New Zealand, most of Europe, Japan, Bali, South Africa, Egypt, to name a few.

I’m a little better in-country.

create your own visited states map

Next on the list are Oregon and Washington. I promised my brother I’d visit him in Portland, and so long as we’re out west, I’d like to visit Seattle and Vancouver. Alaska and Hawaii are high on the wish list, too.

I’ve been overcome by the urge to organize lately. Apparently, it’s contagious around here. I suspect it originated on the West Coast, though, because when I talked to my brother a few weeks ago, he and his girlfriend had already started their early (or late, depending on your point of view) spring cleaning.

After a long snowy day spent throwing things out, here is what I have learned.

1. Empty out the space completely. This lets you see two things–how much space you have, and all the stuff that was crammed into it. Sort things into three piles–keep, sell/give away, and toss. In an ideal world, the keep pile is the smallest pile.

2. Anything you absolutely love and/or use frequently goes in the keep pile.

3. If something needs a minor repair, put it in a separate space in the keep pile, and take it to the appropriate professional repair person in one lot. (For example, everything that needs to be mended or hemmed goes to the seamstress/tailor in one go.)

4. Toss anything that doesn’t fit or look good, has faded or darkened from its original color, is used up, worn out, torn, threadbare, cracked, chipped, hazardous/toxic, dried out, smelly, slimy, leaky, moldy, in need of major repair (unless it’s REALLY worth repairing, AND you’re REALLY going to have it done), missing parts, stained, hosting tiny civilizations, past its expiration date, grotty, otherwise useless, or dead. Yes, dead. One of the stories that went around the BMV when I was working on a project there was from a person who gives driver’s license tests. Apparently, she had a client who had a dead dog in the vehicle because the owner “hadn’t gotten around to burying it yet.”

5. Items may be re-purposed, repainted, repaired, refurbished, etc., but only if you intend to do it (or pay someone else to do it) in the forseeable future. If you said that about an item last time you purged, then it’s time to let it go.

6. Expensive, high-quality items may be worth saving even you aren’t currently using them, especially if you have an eye on resale shops or e-bay. However, if you’re hanging on to something just because it was expensive, ask yourself how much the space you’re keeping it in is worth.

7. If you haven’t worn/used/seen/missed it in two years, sell it, toss it, or give it away.

8. You don’t have to keep something just because somebody gave it to you. Especially if it’s ugly, useless, doesn’t fit, is a duplicate of something else, or not to your taste.

9. Remember my grandmother’s mayonnaise jar collection. If you would be embarrassed to answer the question “why are you saving this?” or you can’t come up with a good answer to “what is it good for?” then you don’t need it. Do you really want to have to explain why, even to yourself, you have a box of small pieces of string labeled “pieces of string too small to save.” (I’m not making this up. We actually did find such an item at my grandparents’ house in Illinois.)

10. Recycle whenever possible–glass, plastic, metal, paper, children, etc.

11. If it’s a major item with a lot of sentinmental value (family heirlooms, wedding dress, etc.) keep it. Use it if you can, store it out of the way (carefully packed and in a climate-controlled space as needed) if you can’t use it. But you’d be surprised by what you can actually use. People get weird about that sort of thing; I know from personal experience. When my grandmother (she of the mayonnaise jar collection) moved into her retirement community, I ended up with her (fabulous) dining room furniture. My parents kindly stored it for me until Ed and I bought a house–and I refused to buy a house that the dining-room furniture wouldn’t fit into. Finally, we got a house, moved in, and unpacked. I actually drew a little map of the china cabinet and buffets, trying to figure out the best way to use the storage and display space. I put everything away, dusted the furniture every week, and for the first three months, I was intimidated by the mere idea of sitting down and having a meal at that table. After all, that was my grandmother’s formal set, the one that we always used for seders and Thanksgiving dinners at her house. Eventually, I realized that I was being ridiculous, and now, I use the dining room table for most meals, for gaming, for sewing, and the occasional seder or Thanksgiving dinner.

12. Think twice about keeping duplicate items. Do you need two toasters–especially if only one of them works? On the other hand, if you discover, say, a stash of lightbulbs for a specific lamp or light fixture that you currently own, it’s OK to save them. Just put them all in one place and label the container.

13. Which brings me to my next point. When you put away the items in the keep pile, label your boxes or containers, especially if they’re not transparent. For example, if you’ve got a lot of shoes, label each box descriptively. Fourteen boxes labeled “shoes” won’t help. (If you’re going full-on Martha Stewart, stick a photo of the item on the front of the box.) Personally, I like transparent plastic tubs in varying sizes. It helps to keep all the containers in a space (on a shelf, in a drawer, on a rack, in a cabinet, etc.) a uniform size and shape, and that makes better use of the space, and looks neater. It’s also easier to keep like items together.

14. When you have finished, go through your keep pile a second time. If in doubt, toss it out (or sell/give away). Everything you keep has to fit back into the space allotted in an organized way.

15. Throw out junk mail, flyers, unwanted religious and political pamphlets, advertising circulars, and the like immediately upon receipt. Don’t save coupons for things you don’t use or stores where you don’t shop. Life is too short to spend sorting through a six-month accumulation of junk paper. On the flip side, file important documents immediately. Nobody likes hunting up that last W2 at 10:00 PM on April 15th. I am embarassed to admit that when I was looking for our passports the other day, I found them in my half-unpacked carry-on bag from the last trip.

16. If you don’t know where to start, the bedroom is a good choice. No matter what the rest of your place looks like, you’ll feel better if you go to sleep and wake up in a tidy place. If you have dust allergies, the bedroom is the best choice, because you’ll sleep better in a clean room.

17. Socks and underwear that are worn out must go right now, no arguments, even if you have to go out and buy more in order to avoid a crisis. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again–I don’t care if the elastic is still good if it isn’t attached to the underwear. Corollary: If the underwear was really lucky, would it have ended up looking like that in the first place?

18. Divide a large or especially intimidating space into mini-projects. If you can’t spend a whole afternoon on your home office, at least take an hour or two to clean out your desk. The hard part about dividing up a space and stretching the project out over several days is keeping your completed areas from being overwhelmed by the parts yet to be done. Invest the time now, and you’ll save it later when you’re not looking for something, or buying a duplicate item because you can’t find the one you have. (My grandfather had two complete sets of drafting tools for this very reason.)

“Sanitation officials in Oslo, Norway, said they will soon create an adventure park within the city’s sewer system, including rafting, theater performances, artwork on the walls, and an area for weddings and parties.” –MSN’s News of the Weird

Sanitation officials in Oslo apparently need to get out more and drink less.

I was watching the History Channel’s four-hour Barbarians marathon Tuesday night, and in the middle of hour three, the Mongols, who should I see on screen but one of the professors from my former graduate department. Naturally, my first thought was to email a contact at my old department and one of my grad school classmates, and see what they thought about the program. Turned out that my classmate (now working on his Ph. D. at the University of Wisconsin) hadn’t seen it, but had spoken to one of his profs, who had.

Glaring errors pointed out by my source in a very brief email (I noticed these, too, when I was watching):

1. No Asian actors playing Mongols! You’d think this would be a no-brainer. I hope the producers hear about it from SAG.

2. One of the talking heads said that Mongolia was the “coldest place on earth” and that the temperature got down to “90 degrees below zero.” Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG! Granted, it does get bring-your-brass-monkeys-inside cold in Mongolia; today’s high and low temperatures in the captial were -6 degrees and -27 degrees Fahrenheit respectively–without wind chill. However, the coldest place on Earth is Vostok Station in Antarctica (DUH!), which records low temps in the vicinity of -100 degrees Fahrenheit (the record is -126 degrees). Now, if I can look that up in less than five minutes, why couldn’t the fact-checker? (Of course, that assumes that they used a fact-checker.)

I also noticed a distinct lack of horses in much of the re-enactment video. This is like watching a Gulf War I documentary without any footage from smart bombs or planes.

And from what I know–and granted, it doesn’t compare to what either of the aforementioned professors or my dissertating friend know–that’s the tip of the iceberg. (As I said to my ex-classmate, if I can spot errors in the Viking portion of the series, then you know somebody didn’t do their research!) My source is of the opinion that the only material provided by the interviewees that the producers used was the interview footage, despite the fact that at least one of the interviewees was asked to consult on the project. It looks that way to me, and apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so. According to my pal at UW, his prof said “They had some reasonable talking heads (Robert Hillenbrand, John Woods, Christopher Atwood, Sheila Blair), but between them, i.e. when the heads weren’t talking, it was very bad indeed.” Content-wise, I find it hard to argue. (Granted, it’s not easy to cram several hundred years of history into 44 minutes, but if you’re going to go to that much trouble, why not make the effort to do a good job of it?) I was annoyed that the program kept referring to what the Mongols did as “new,” when much of it was new only outside of Central Asia. And I was particularly displeased with the emphasis on the reports of excessive cruelty and general barbarism. This is nothing new; the Mongols were some of the few victors who didn’t get to write the well-known version of history…or at least, didn’t get their version well-publicized, which just goes to show the value of a good agent. One of the few things that the show did get right–and it was almost lost in passing–was the emphasis on the fact that there weren’t that many ethnic Mongols at the time. (There was a large confederation of several ethnic groups, including Mongols, but not as large as some of the contemporary writings estimate.)

Moving from content to production values, I have to say that even when the talking heads were on, the visuals weren’t as good as the audio. I was not impressed with the lighting or camera work on Christopher Atwood’s interview–half his face was in shadow, and the camera operator set the shot in such a way that his subject was constantly leaning out of the frame. On the other hand, the non-talking-head video had a few lovely scenic shots, and the computer-animated map overlays were nicely done.

All things being equal, I’m glad that I fell asleep halfway through the Huns. My ex-classmate said “Could be a useful teaching tool though: What’s wrong with this picture?” What the program did do very well was illustrate the fact that the History Channel is about entertainment, not education. It’s being re-run on Saturday night, so watch it for yourself and let me know what you think.