Category: What the…?

We’d just had the house and garage painted in the summer of 2002 after uncovering the wood siding on the house for the first time in decades, and I was getting ready on a clear, October Saturday afternoon to put gutters back on the garage. It’s not a tall structure, and I could reach the gutters from the ground without even stretching, but I couldn’t quite get the angle on the screws for the brackets without some help, so I grabbed a stepladder and started work.

I did the back side of the garage where it was tight against our fence first, and was just about finished with the brackets on the garden side, when I was suddenly on the ground and in a lot of pain. I yelled for Barbara, extricated my leg from the remains of the stepladder, and remember feeling kind of weird as my foot dangled from my leg when I raised it out of the wreckage.

An accomplished klutz, I of course had a pair of crutches in the house. Barbara grabbed them, sped me to the Kaiser Sunnyside Emergency Room, and I hobbled from the car to wait in line while she parked. I thought I was doing pretty well, considering, but flubbed and said “compound” when I meant “multiple” fracture as I was describing my injury to the woman at the check-in; she wasted no time in correcting the guy standing on crutches with a floppy foot.

Anyway, the end result looked like this:

Not the end of the story, but the end for now.

Meanwhile, in the annals of failure, I was really looking forward to presenting a piece on the early years of Dungeons & Dragons at Ignite Portland 11 last month. Back in the day—twelve or fifteen years ago—I gave a number of presentations at Macromedia UCON and other venues, I used to teach at Portland State, etc. What I didn’t realize until after I’d signed up and done a bunch of work on my presentation is Ignite doesn’t allow the use of notes.

I can speak extemporaneously about a lot of subjects. I can compete in trivia competitions (another crutches-related story). I can answer audience and student questions. I can cold-read a script and put emphasis into most of the right spots. But I can’t memorize material verbatim, even if I’ve written and re-written it all myself. I wasn’t willing (or prepared) to, uh, cheat, as it appeared one presenter before me did. So this is what happens. It goes off the rails even before the first slide has cleared the screen:

And this is more or less how it should have gone:

How could I have missed this song all these years? I tuned into some Harvey Danger through Pandora (it truly is like opening a box of evil) after hearing the snippet of “Flagpole Sitta'” used for the theme of the truly brilliant “Peep Show” series and heard this song for the first time.

People who could buy and sell you
Sharing a joke that they will never tell you
You think you’re dialed in, someone has to win
And you know what that means,
Well then someone’s got to lose
It’s probably you, it’s probably you.

—Harvey Danger, “Only Cream and Bastards Rise”

You’ll never live like common people,
you’ll never do what common people do,
you’ll never fail like common people,
you’ll never watch your life slide out of view,
and dance and drink and screw,
because there’s nothing else to do.

—”Common People”, Different Class, Pulp

Friday marks the beginning of my fifth year of unemployment. This time, I mean.

I was laid off from my job at the end of May 2007, just before most of the rest of the people at the company I was working for, and I went back into the freelance market with some trepidation, because I’d taken the job eighteen months earlier due to a couple of rocky years. A lot of my clients had disappeared in the tech bust between 2000 and 2001, I’d had a little brush with mortality the next year that kept me out of circulation for a couple of months, and I’d been actively looking for something more substantial for a while. Then it was gone and I was back on the market, having spent my time in a sort of Director eddy while the rest of the multimedia stream moved on.

And here I am five years out, still in the same situation I was back in 2005 before I took the job, but fifty and with a portfolio of work that gets increasingly creaky with the passing months. I can’t really recommend it.

I still get to work with great people like Duc Le of Duc Designed, Dino Citraro of Periscopic, and Chris Williams at Formations. Folks I’ve known for a decade or more, for the most part.

Reed classmate and magazine editor Chris Lydgate took me on to write a profile for the latest issue of the alumni magazine.

And, of course, Tomer Berda, a colleague from our Director days, continues to inspire the poker playing side of my business.

So there’s that.

I have to admit a certain amount of schadenfreude at the protestations of the libertarian free marketeers of the Cato Institute bleating about the visible hands of the conservative Koch brothers attempting to make the outfit a more blatantly partisan political operation by packing the board of directors.

Cato president Ed Crane said in a statement:

Mr. Koch’s actions in Kansas court yesterday represent an effort by him to transform Cato from an independent, nonpartisan research organization into a political entity that might better support his partisan agenda. We view Mr. Koch’s actions as an attempt at a hostile takeover, and intend to fight it vehemently in order to continue as an independent research organization, advocating for Individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace.

In a New Yorker profile of Indian bioengineering mogul Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (behind paywall), the subject is described participating in a panel discussion of author Shobhaa Dé’s latest autobiographical book: Shobhaa at Sixty.

Mazumdar-Shaw smirked. “I hope you’ll permit me, I just thought of a song,” she said, and offered an improvised rhyme. “Shobhaa, tell us. All modern women are jealous. How do you manage to look so terribly young, without Botox and suctions and treatments far flung?”

This is the chorus to Tom Lehrer’s “Alma,” from 1965’s That Was the Year That Was, dedicated to the woman who married (in succession) composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, and writer Franz Werfel.

Alma, tell us!

All modern women are jealous.

Which of your magical wands

Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?

I started running those Google AdSense blocks on the right of my site back in early 2007, well after my posting had tapered off, but thanks to you all it’s provided me with a little late holiday present. Arriving in the mail on this last day of 2011: a check from Google for just over $100, covering almost four years of AdSense displays.

Sadly, my best-ever earnings came in May 2007—way back at the beginning—and even that didn’t break $10. It was just before I was laid off from the Last Director Job Ever.

I’m not sure what made that month’s traffic high. Was it my correction of Jim Lehrer that ended up on the journalism site Romanesko? Was it the analysis of how Democratic Senators who voted against the Iraq AUMF had a better re-election track record than those who cheered the war on? Or was it the photo of me corrupting the youth of Springfield, Oregon with the evils of pencil-and-paper role-playing games?

There were seven months that followed where the average take was above $4.60, but only three months since January 2008 have made more than $2.50 (and never more than $3); nearly half the past four years has been under $1 per month.

Maybe I should write something people (at least briefly) think they want to read, again. $9 a month, man….

I’m so tired of your lies
And the evil things you’re doing behind my back
Are there crimes that you have never committed?
I doubt it
Sometimes I wonder when will you die

You’re insane
You are bad
You wreck everything you touch and you’re a sociopath
There’s just one thing that everyone’s wondering
When will you die?

Schoolchildren stay at home
And all the banks will close
Each year we’ll mark the date
On which we celebrate

I know how
I know why
I can picture every part of your comeuppance except
For the one remaining piece of the puzzle
Which is when you’ll die

This is Dan and that’s Dan
And there’s Marty on the drums to complete the band
And I’m John and he is also John and all of us are wondering
When you’re going to die

Still you live
You go on
But you’re running out the clock and if we knew how long
I’d be counting down the days until the lovely one
On which you’re gone

On that promised morning we will wake and greet the dawn
Knowing that your wicked life is over and that we will carry on

We’ll exhale
We’ll high-five
We will know at last how great it is to be alive
We’ll be lining up and buying tickets and then we’ll be
Jumping up and down on your grave

You’re insane
You are bad
You wreck everything you touch and you’re a sociopath
And the only way to mitigate would be to know the date
You’re scheduled to vacate
When are you going to die?
Look me in the eye
Tell me when you’ll die

“When Will You Die?”, Join Us, They Might Be Giants

Another idea from long ago that I never followed up on, getting press in the new millennium: Evie and Victor’s blood-spattered couture.

Not exactly the same as my planned customizable line of “KasualTees” (featuring appliques of a variety of wounds on flesh-colored tee shirts), but close enough to cross it off the list.

It’s like they’re not even trying. Email today from the “U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”

This is to Officially inform you that it has come to our notice and we have thoroughly completed an Investigated with the help of our Intelligence Monitoring Network System that you are having a business transaction Consignment Box filed with united state dollars which is on held at custody of New York City police department, During our Investigation, it came to our notice that the reason why you have not received your payment is because you didn’t cover the fund with Original Deposit Clearance Certificate.

Seriously, Nigerians, if you’re going to try to scam people out of money, at least take the time to make the introductory paragraph read smoothly. Show a little self-respect.