You're Doing It Wrong

I actually have other items to post about here but haven’t managed to get to it today. But I’m going to use this moment before dinner to tell you that I went to Stardust today and it was awesome. The review in the paper said that the movie started out slow but won you over as it went along. The first hour in I was thinking, “Yeah, solid B+.” But then the second half is totally off the hook and fabulous. I’ve seen it compared to The Princess Bride and I’ll go with that.

The trailers were nerdgirl porn heaven. The Golden Compass, The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, something I’ve never heard of called The Spiderwick Chronicles which stars Freddie Highmore who broke my heart in Finding Neverland and the Mom from Weeds. Also a trailer for Beowulf.

If I was a person who hated fantasy movies I’d note some major similarities and images that all these movies have in common. But I don’t hate them. So I’ll just say they looked “omigod, if I get a terminal illness in the next few weeks I’ll kill myself” great, except maybe the need for more dragons.

If there had been a trailer for Prince Caspian they would have had to wipe me off the floor. (Teaser for Caspian here.)

Completely unrelated but for the third Friday at dinnertime in a row, some young person has stopped by our door for some stupid reason. Person #1 wanted to give us a “free” security system in exchange for putting a sign in our yard. Since my colleague has such a “free” system installed for $275 and I am old enough to know that “free” is a big fat lie, I declined.

Last week was some kid who is very concerned about global warming. It’s not a joke and we need to do something about it. And something seemed to involve me writing a check. Besides that, I didn’t hear anything about what they were actually going to do about global warming. I sent him on his way as well.

Spoiler alert but I almost never give money to people who come to my door. My only exception is for really cute kids selling candy that I would actually eat for ballet or something like that.

Today a young gal came over and wanted to know if she could put a small sign for her company, which she pointed their logo on her shirt to emphasise, in our front yard, because they wanted our neighbors to get familiar with the name.

“I’m not interested,” I said.

“It’s really important that we get our name out there,” she said.

“It’s not important to me. But thanks for stopping by.” Begin closing door.

“It’s just a small sign. We’d pay you for it.”

My head spinning around and the dragon breath shooting out, “I don’t want your sign in my yard. I was polite I said no thank you, good bye.”

I HATE marketing. I hate that every inch of clear space in the universe has to be plastered with an ad. I hate branding. I hate loyalty programs (mostly). Now I’m supposed to do some sketchy company a favor and let them put an ad in my yard? Now I can drive through my neighborhood and be assaulted by marketing in people’s private yards?

And she didn’t even tell me what the company does.

Johnette

Yesterday Johnette Napolitano played downtown at lunchtime for Noon Tunes, some sort of summer program that I’ve never paid much attention to. She was the lead singer for Concrete Blonde which was one of my very favorite L.A. bands in the 80’s. I saw them a bunch of times. I last saw them when they came through town in 2002.

I was having challenging day so it was nice to get out and have something fun to do at lunch. It was down at Pioneer Square and I failed to crop and upload my own photo so here are a couple of good ones not by me. (I can’t decide which I love more Wikipedia or Flickr.). The audience sat on those steps and there was this random 10 foot square patch of grass in a wooden frame and a few chairs in front of the stage.

I got there right as she started and it was one of those perfect blissful collisions of past and present, hanging outside, woman and guitar, kooky dancing lady at the front of the stage, that for a full 5 seconds I considered joining, and my P and J sandwich. The faint scent clove cigarettes wafted by. I was thrilled to be there.

She played a combination of covers, new stuff and classic Concrete Blonde. The audience was part longtime diehard fans like me and then lunch crowd people stopping to check it out. She got some passionate applause and she sounded knock-your-socks-off fabulous. At the end she played Joey which was a minor hit and you could sense that audience shift whenever an act plays a song everyone’s dying to hear. Right about then a group of high school age kids who were probably not even alive when this song was on the radio shuffled through the stage area. They did this sort of mocking conga line thing like you would have done at that age if you walked through your Aunt Eunice and Uncle Larry’s 50th wedding anniversary and they were playing Love Me Tender. It was funny and sort of depressing at the same time.

My only complaint, and stop me if you’ve heard this before, is what is up with those people who take the time and trouble to show up at live music and then proceed to talk during the entire thing? You can eat your lunch anywhere. Why show up at this thing and yak yak yak. I finally moved and sat on the ground by the stage.

More Failure Notice Troubles
Sorry, I know my technical woes are not remotely interesting but I’m explaining why you may have gotten a failure notice if you sent me email. I continue to use my C- technical skills to try to fix my email spoofing problem which I have just now learned has a name: backscatter. I managed to set up a separate email box and my mail was piling up in there but thenI couldn’t get to it. I kept getting a bad password notice. I un-set up that but lost everything in there. Then I reset something so that I was generating failure notices again. Now I’ve just fixed that. I think.

It’s All About Me
Many years ago I paid $100 an hour to hear something that I’m going to tell you for free:

It’s not always about you.

I know. Take a moment. Absorb that.

I had this idea for a post where I was going to ask about having secrets that you would never tell anyone. Ever.

But then I realized that, of course, everyone has secrets that they keep to themselves. It doesn’t have to be some sort of mobster style crime just thoughts or feelings you’re, whatever, I suppose the base emotion would be shame, so, too ashamed to share even if you’ve drank too much and are sitting with your best and most trusted friend of all time.

And isn’t this a conceit of being a human being that you wander around through life thinking you’re the only person who has ever gone through what you’re going through? How many times in your life have you felt relief when you learned that a behavior you have that you have deemed crazy, is business as usual for someone else?

I just read this book by Francine Prose which I didn’t like. BUT, there’s a scene in the book where this character has just had an awkward experience and he’s trying to reel himself in and he’s self-conscious and he goes into his office and even though he’s all by himself, he goes through these motions, as if someone were watching, to indicate, all is normal. Have you ever done that? No ones around but you act as if people are watching? In the book he’s opening and closing desk drawers and shuffling papers. I have. I never imagined other people doing this yet here it is, in a book.

Then Daria on the radio was telling a story about driving her family out to the coast and having all sorts of driving anxiety: what if the car breaks down, what if I get lost, what if I’m in the wrong lane and no one will let me over? I am the queen of all forms of driving anxiety. And here is cool radio personality telling the same story.

My final example has to do with what I refer to as nervous traveler. I don’t eat ginormous quantities of food on vacation. I always thought I was the only person alive who came back from vacation having lost weight. And look here, Eden articulates my problem almost perfectly, “I have this thing when I travel where I can’t eat very much? It’s a combination of nerves and an irrational fear of experiencing a food-borne illness in a city thousands of miles from a familiar bucket to barf in.”

I’m sure the world is a better place with some secrets.

Ferk.

I got a response from my domain host telling my how I can stop getting the 10 jillion bounced messages from the latest spammer spoofer debaucle and apparently I fixed it so all my email was bouncing.

So I’ve just now set it back how it was. I need to read these instructions more closely and I don’t feel like it right now.

Meanwhile, something I forgot to mention in my earlier post is that Bob and I saw a movie called Once. More, including clips and music.

It’s an Irish film and sorta a romance and sorta a musical but not in any conventional sense. Wonderful music. We both loved it.

I Don’t Feel Tardy
I always used to wonder how a person could abandon his or her website. There’s always so much going on, how could you ever run out of things to say? Or how could you put so much energy into something and then just stop doing it?

Now I get it. I’m not saying I want to abandon my website. Just that I can understand how this could happen.

The past couple of weeks every post has been like pulling teeth. It’s like I just don’t want to talk about it. It all seems too boring or too hard to put into words. Or whatever. Not in the mood.

There are some things going on which I don’t care to talk about at this time but go under the general umbrella topic of change.

I’m not a person who embraces change. I did not grow up in a house where risk-taking was encouraged. I’ve managed to set up my life with very little stress and a built up a fine and heavily padded comfort zone and comfort zones within my comfort zone. I think it’s probably good for me to step out of the comfort zone for a change but I’m not enjoying it and feel like I’m always on the verge of either throwing up or bursting into tears. Or both at the same time.

More on this as it develops.

This morning we went to the Farmer’s Market in Portland. It’s bigger and has different vendors and Bob has been trying to talk me into going over there with him for a couple of weeks. I had on light pants and a sleeveless top and I considered that I might want a sweater. But c’mon, it’s August. How can I wear a sweater in August? I was cold the whole time and grateful when we finally got back in the car.

Meanwhile, I’m cold and glum and we went to the coffee stand and somehow they gave me the wrong drink which I didn’t notice until we’d wandered around a bit. So I hiked back to the stand and they were like, “Yeah, there’s was a person with the same name so you took the wrong drink.” A customer stood next to me and said, “Yeah, it was mine.” “Sorry,” I said and then they deigned to make me a replacement drink, like they were doing me a favor.

Isn’t there some basic tenet of business where you don’t make the customer feel like shit when a mistake is made? Especially since I didn’t make the mistake. By my reasoning, they served me the wrong drink. The customer should be giving them the stink eye and they should be apologizing to me. That added to my dark mood.

But we did find a giant fabulous piece of fresh salmon for dinner tonight. Fresh salmon will save me.

This is the current state of my front yard pumpkin patch. It’s bursting. The other photo is an osprey family on the Columbia River.

A couple of weeks ago I had a comment on one of my flickr photos. It’s my neighbor’s yard. She uses bowling balls for decoration.

The following is the conversation:

Him: is the one near the bottom right hand corner of the photo a red, white and blue ball by AMF, if so, would you consider selling the ball perhaps?

Me: Hi: You asked about a bowling ball in a photo. It’s not mine, it’s in a neighbor’s yard so I don’t know what kind it is. Sorry I can’t be more helpful.

Him: could you do me a favor, could you go to your neighbor and ask about the ball and maybe also ask to see if hey would consider selling the ball?, and where are you folks from?

Me: Sorry I can’t help you.

I don’t know this person I just said hi and commented on her yard. I don’t feel comfortable going over there and telling her someone on the Internet asked to buy a bowling ball.

Him: hi, can you ask your neighbor if its a ball by AMF Voit and red, white, and blue in color and see if they will sell the ball and maybe take a few more photos of it also? where are you guys from and is this your next door neighbor?

Now me commenting : Does this sound like a prank? Like I have nothing better to do than run around the neighborhood helping some guy with his bowling balls?

This spam thing is getting me down. Every time I log on I have a bazillion bounced messages. I hit check mail and then leave the room and empty the dishwasher and by the time I’m finished the MAILER-DAEMONS are all loaded up. Plus all the nice auto-responder notes from people who are on vacation but will get back to me as soon as they can. Sometimes these messages are in a foreign language but I’m guessing that’s what they say. Some messages inform me that the email user has a spam filter and I haven’t been approved so please reply to I can be approved. Or maybe even a scolding message that they don’t accept spam messages and I’m not approved.

Who thought that technology development was going to do anything? The spammers don’t even see the rejected messages.

I attempted to set up my own mail filtering but there were so many permutations, it didn’t help much. I’m trying to think of an evil punishment for spammers but my creativity is on the fritz and all I can think of is letting the victims throw things at him or her. I’d throw cartons of yogurt 3 months past date.

My domain has been used by spammers again. There should be a way to do something about this. Right now I’m getting about 100 mailer daemons a day. At first they all looked like they were from Germany but now looks like everything. argh.

Look, my first tomato, yay. I’m going to have it in my dinner salad tonight.

Bob and I went to see The Simpsons Movie yesterday at the first showing. There hasn’t been one movie I was dying to see all summer except this one and when I mentioned it a month or two ago, he said he might be gone because it was a Cheese weekend. I indicated some disappointment with this and what do you know, he modified his plan.

We are huge Simpsons fans and rarely miss the show. Our favorite episode, I think the first episode we ever watched together is Bart the Daredevil which is the Springfield Gorge one. We have seen it at least 10 times and we clutch our bellies and squeeze tears out of our eyes in laughter every single time. We will stop anything we’re doing to watch the last 10 minutes of that episode. One of us could sever a limb and we’d be running out the door with the cooler and a bloody stump wrapped in a towel and if the TV was on with this episode we’d pause before we rushed to the hospital. You can imagine our delight when this episode is alluded to in the movie.

I’m surprised there wasn’t more Simpsons-mania. Yeah, sure the Oregonian had a cover story on the outrage that Springfield, Vermont got to host the premiere instead of Springfield, Oregon. Even Matt said he thought the Simpsons were from Springfield, Oregon. Or Beaverton. (Local humor.)

We bought our tickets in advance and arrived early and quickly found a seat in the almost empty theater. We sat through a half hour of commercials, mostly for TV shows. I hate to say it because I am desperate to cut back on my shows, but that new Bionic Woman show looks like it’s going to be good. Also they had a bunch of shows that look like shows we already have. Someone with powers has to stop evil from ending the world. Some plucky woman overcomes some setback to make a new start. Is it because I’m old and have already see it all? Or is it because there are 10 trillion channels and the creative forces in the TV industry only have so many ideas?

By the time the movie started more people arrived. Mostly guys in the 20-40 range and I don’t want to use the word nerdy, but let’s say the kind of guys who can write computer code and watch Battlestar Galactica rather than the kind of guys who work in finance and use hair product. There were two other women in the room, both accompanying people too young to drive. Ladies, take note.

It’s hard to have hope for America after sitting through a half dozen trailers for what have to be the dumbest movies ever. Daddy Day Camp? Some sort of underground ping pong movie that looked like a spoof of a spoof. A Santa Claus movie with Vince Vaughn that you could tell the trailer had the only good parts in the movie. Plus an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie that Bob was excited about. (Generational thing, no doubt.) And Horton Hears a Who which I love as a book but the trailer was not even a tiny bit appealing.

We loved the Simpsons movie. There were a very few moments where I felt my attention drifting but otherwise, they kept the energy and the laughs coming. I don’t think it was a magical life-changing Simpsons, just a really long good TV episode — but I love the show so why not a big episode on the big screen? Plus you get to see Bart’s doodle and Otto with his bong. When are you going to see that on TV? Two thumbs up from this household.

In other film news, I watched Howl’s Moving Castle on DVD last night and it is fantastic. I also watched the first Fantastic Four movie on cable recently and it was dreadful.