You're Doing It Wrong

Here, learn about Cross Border Fraud. You know telemarketing scams and stuff like that. Some lady called the office and told me about all these outrageous fees I’m paying on my phone bill and I said, “How do you know?” and she said it was her job to know and did I want to hear about it or was she wasting her time. Can you guess what I told her?

I forgot to mention earlier that we finally saw The Man Who Wasn’t There which is strange even by Coen brothers standards. It’s — well — I’m trying to figure out how to sum it up in a few words and can’t quite come up with it. It’s filmed in black and white and looks amazing and the performances are excellent but the story is a big downer with this guy making one mistake that takes down everybody and along with that a UFO micro-subplot. I asked Bob “what are they trying to say?” and he said we’d probably never know.

My email went crap! yesterday — sorry to everyone who got rejected as spam — as near as I can tell, my ISP thinks that my domain host is a spammer. The way I’m set up is you send me email at my domain and my domain forwards the mail to my ISP address and I get all my mail in one place. So when my ISP thinks my domain is spam — it rejects all the mail. Large pain in the butt, eh? So for now I have the forwarding disabled — so you should be able to use the pamrentz.com address. And I’ve disabled spamcop so I can get all the viagra and super low mortgage rate ads and hopefully I can get this thing cleared up.

We went to see Sherman Alexie last night, reading from his new book: Ten Little Indians. He read for almost an hour. The story was called something like “Looking for a Witness” and the highpoints were fantastic, some parts hilarious, some challenging — fiction about 9/11. But it dragged in some parts and lost me. He did a long Q&A too. I’ve seen him read at least 5 times and judging by last night he’s softened around the edges — and I mean that in the best possible way.

It’s supposed to be a scorcher today so I’ve got to dig the hoses out. I have been meaning to take care of that for days.

Here are some fun Matrix Essays for you. This is geek stuff. People who dissect every arcane detail for multiple meanings. I think the alleged intelligence of this movie has been wildly inflated but hey, great car chase.

Check out these excellent cat outfits — seriously. The gentleman’s package was not what I expected. ahem.

The traffic going home tonight was hideous. What was going on? It was all bungled up getting from Riverplace out to Front Ave. So I went to take the back way which for me means I use Moody to go back to Macadam and get on I-5 only I guess there is some “big pipe” project (sounds like a porno movie) going on to diminish the raw sewage that goes into the river when it rains a lot so Moody is all torn up and there’s a detour and it took me forever to figure that out and then the freeway was about 10 miles an hour the whole way home. I got home at 7:15 PM and blew off doing the grocery shopping. I can’t wait to see how long it takes me when the new outdoor concert stadium in Clark County gets going — stay tuned here for endless griping.

I haven’t had the energy to keep up with this lately. I went to Ocean Shores on Monday for some training for work. I go to this training almost every year and I always complain about it but I had a fantastic time this year. I rolled by the Resort about 7pm on Monday and I was starved so I decided to go into town and see if I could find something to eat. Not much there. McDonalds. I couldn’t do it and I don’t like to go to sit down restaurants by myself. On my way out I noticed the movie theater and XMen was starting at 7:05 pm. Perfect. I saw the movie instead and was completely entertained. How can Hugh Jackman be such a hunk in the XMen movies and then in Kate & Leopold he was such a girly man? It’s like two different people.

There was a high speed chase on our street Wednesday night. It was about 10:30 and we were both a little more than half asleep. I heard the sirens getting closer and closer and next thing you know we hear “crash, crash, boom” and the police car stopped on our street with the lights flashing and left the siren screaming for at least 10 minutes which added a David Lynch quality to the whole event. We looked out the window but couldn’t see anything so we went outside and stood around with our neighbors not really sure what we were looking at. Someone said the guy was running red lights and the cops were chasing him. A few more patrol cars showed up — we had state patrol, police and sheriff. The next morning we could see where he made a right onto our street, went wide and smashed a Hyundai so that the wheel was bent in and then he lost control, swerved all the way to the other side of the street and took the bumper off a heavy duty commercial truck and then back across the street again, took out a huge shrub and portion of white picket fence before stopping on the lawn of the house three down from us. Very exciting evening.

Also on Weds I saw Bend it Like Beckham which is fantastic: run, don’t walk. I’m going to buy it the moment it’s available on DVD. It’s hilarious and sweet and pays off huge. It made me think I could play soccer – you know, if I could just get into shape which is hilarious since I was *never* good at sports especially team sports. I’m not competitive that way.

Friday I saw Matrix Reloaded and was completely entertained. I didn’t read any reviews beforehand and now I’m seeing a lot of lukewarm responses. Someone said it was a brilliant mediocre movie. I guess I can see that. The talky parts did seem to serve mainly as a rest between cool action sequences and the love story is the weakest part of the whole thing and the flimsy thread holding the thing together. But who cares? I loved it.

Also Friday we saw Bill Bryson at Powell’s. He drew a GIGANTIC crowd. We were about 45 minutes early and the room was already 3/4’s full. He was hilarious and sounded exactly like his books (and books on tape). If you’ve never heard of him he writes travel stories and he’s both interesting and funny.

Last night we went to see Freeman Dyson lecture on technology and social justice. He talked about how we can use technology to narrow the gap between rich and poor and illustrated his point by telling various stories. The best story was about Sabriye Tenberken, a German woman who is blind. Using a computer, she “translated” Tibeten texts into braille to use for her studies and ended up founding a series of schools for blind children in Tibet. I enjoyed the lecture more than I thought I would although the question and answer portion of the program was excruciating. It was like people asked questions that showed off how smart they were. There were also a number of people that wanted to debate (Dr. Dyson is more open minded about genetically altered foods than your average Oregonian) and Dr. Dyson didn’t come prepared to argue as much as just talk about his ideas.

When I was going through airport security on the way out, I didn’t take my shoes off. I didn’t think they would set off the beep. So of course I beeped. I had to go to the special area where they take your shoes and then you sit down and they wand your legs and then you have to stand on a thing and put a foot on each “peanut” and hold your arms out while they wand you. I had zero metal on me except my zipper and my earrings. The lady was wanding me and asking me if I had anything in my pockets. “I don’t have any pockets,” I told her. On the way home I did not want to go through that again so I took my shoes off and sweater and again, I beeped. Same routine with the wand and the peanuts. The wand only beeped around my bra — I think the wonderbra sets off security. Whatever “the wonder” is must have metal in it.

Tonight Woodward dropped off Tyler. Bob and I are dogsitting this weekend. Tyler is a very old, grey golden retriever. He has a lot of personality. Right now he’s trying to find a comfortable place to sleep. He keeps moving between me in here and Bob in the other room, checking on us.

I finally read Boonville by Robert Mailer Anderson this weekend. I didn’t love it but I liked it a lot. It’s very much what I like to call “a boy book” — and that refers to the writing style not the actual story. The story is funny with lots of nutty, hilarious characters but sometimes I found myself drifting and by the end I was glad it was over.

I’ve figured out why the bed looks funny. Bob told me he spilled something on the comforter cover and had to wash it — then he put the comforter back on sideways. He thinks I’m too picky about how we do things around here and while that may be true, I don’t think putting the comforter in the cover the right way qualifies as “picky.”