March 2008 Archives

Dear Citizens of Seattle (mostly to the boys, but sadly, to some of the girls, too),

Would you please quit spitting on the sidewalk so much?  When walking around downtown, I literally can't walk more than three steps without having to maneuver around your little mounds of saliva and mucus.  It's fucking disgusting.  If you must expectorate, perhaps you could try spitting into a trash can?  Or a grassy area?  Or onto the street and not the sidewalk?

(Special exemption: I once saw a guy spit on a pigeon.  It was still gross, but at least it made me laugh.  Sorry, pigeon.  Karma.)

But seriously people, stop it.  You're sicking me out.  I saw a homeless guy pissing against a building last week and that did not bother me 1/8th as much as your phlegm.

Sincerely,

halee

Due to my continuing interest in all things Scandinavian, my ever-present interest in music, and my recent and all-encompassing interest in Metalocalypse, I decided to read up on the history of black metal.  Therefore I'm reading a charming non-fiction book called "Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground."  A few choice passages:

• "Black metal has taken the fire of Loki and used it as fuel, the accelerant for a one-way ride to hell."
• "Death metal bands would play shows wearing jogging suits and he [Euronymous] was totally against that."
• "A saying is that most Norwegians will visit church on three occasions in their lives, and on two of them, they will be carried in."

As it turns out, certain Norwegians (ahem, I'm looking at you, Varg) will visit churches more often than that...specifically to burn them to the ground.

Anyway, it's an interesting (and admittedly) scary tale of all the tall tales and legends of Varg, Euronymous, Dead, Bard, Metalion, etc.  And church burnings, suicides, murders, etc.  Partially told through interviews of those currently in prison for their deeds, particularly Mr. Varg.  This book was written a couple of years ago, and as I was reading last night there were a few references to Varg potentially being out on parole in 2006.

I was reading up on Wikipedia today to try to find out if he really was released two years ago (he wasn't), and was surprised/frightened to quickly glance across a headline alluding to his attempted prison escape.  But then I read the details...

In October 2003, Vikernes failed to return to his low-security prison in Tønsberg, Norway, after having been granted a short leave.

What???  I had already read details of how he's able to maintain his website from prison, and how he's released two Burzum albums while incarcerated, and now this?  Short leaves from prison...for CONVICTED MURDERERS?  I realize Norway is very progressive, but whoa.  This is quite foreign to me, considering my Texas background and the "just lethal inject all of 'em" stance there.  Anyway, Varg is up for parole next month, and I will be watching the proceedings closely...

Rick Marshall.  Will.  Holly.  A routine expedition. 

Those were as much a part of my childhood and glasses and braces!  And I recently learned that they're re-making it into a Hollywood movie, starring none other than Will Farrell as Rick Marshall!  I love me a throwback movie, assuming it's done well (i.e. not Dukes of Hazzard).  I love me some Will Farrell, there hasn't been much he's done that I haven't approved of (i.e. not Bewitched).  I also love the challenge of casting a movie even though nobody asked me, so the second I heard about this I set about to selecting a pack of sleestaks on behalf of the filmmakers:

• Venus Williams
• Will Arnett
• Sasha Baron Cohen

All were selected for their tall, lanky builds and/or abilities to hiss.

Matt has been trying to convince me to cast Jennifer Aniston, purely so one of the sleestaks can have a Rachel™ haircut.  I violently disagreed until I heard that filming was going on today down in Pike Place Market for one of Jenn's latest movies...which I thought would be a great opportunity to approach her to gauge her interest in portraying a sleestak.  Or kidnap her and force her to play a sleestak.  Well, here: just look at the IM conversation between me and Matt and marvel at the relevance of our avatars:



Matt posted this on his livejournal, and one of his buddies had the idea that's even MORE genius than the Land of the Lost remake....SLEESTAKS IN SEATTLE!!

I got an email from a friend this morning who up until yesterday, thought Vegemite was a fictional substance.  When she found out it was real, she called upon me and my experiences in Australia to learn more.  Here is my response to her:

"Yes, I have suffered through the insufferable Vegemite.  (Although I never had an entire sandwich.  Just one little dob on the end of a spoon was enough to make me gag.)  It's a super-Aussie thing to eat, apparently it is made from the yeasty byproduct of all the beer they brew.  It's like grape jelly to them, and they put it on toast, sandwiches....they even have those little individual snack packages like we have with cheese where there are 4 crackers, a compartment for the cheese (or in this case, Vegemite), and that little red stick to wipe it on the cracker.

I was forced to eat it by my Aussie friends, despite my violent protests.  They are very loyal to their Vegemite, and they insisted that I might as well not have ever lived in Australia if I didn't eat it. 

It was DISGUSTING.  It tastes like rancid fur.  Seriously.  Imagine pouring a Guinness and then skimming the foam off the top, putting that foam in a petri dish, letting it dry into a paste and rot and grow mold, then mixing it with about 50% salt.  That is what Vegemite tastes like."

If you're daring and you want to eat furry rancid beer paste....Vegemite can be found in the States at places like World Market.  Best of luck with that.  I'll be over here.

This is exciting.  A friend of mine at work saw the Excel screencap of the needlepoint I made, and she runs analytics on artofoffice.com, which is a site where (mostly) Mac users flex their Microsoft business application software muscles to create art using Excel, PowerPoint, or Word.  She made me submit my template, despite my PC-user status.

So I am now on artofoffice.com, lookie!

I'll be expecting an email from Mark Mothersbaugh (the site's featured artist) any minute!

After 3 months of anticipatorily gazing at the tickets on my refrigerator, the Magnetic Fields show finally happened last night!  I have seen precious few shows since I moved to Seattle, and it was a really, really, really good one to see.  It was at Town Hall, which was an old Church of Christ downtown, still complete with pews (but no kneelers).  After my umpteenth joke asking Matt and Chris if I was in the right place for the town hall meeting to save Jupiter Hollow, the opening act came out...  

They were called the Interstellar Radio Company, and I guess the best way to explain them is as a science fiction comedy performance troupe?  It was strange, but interesting and good.  They basically put on a live old-timey radio serial show, and the particular story they performed was about these two business partners who are in the business of decontaminating planets.  And the planet they go to decontaminate contains a specific gaseous material that stimulates your imagination, and they found themselves being hunted down by the monsters they had dreamed up as kids.  As far as the performers, one guy played the accordion, one guy did the voices of the 6 or so characters, and one guy did all the sound effects.  I learned:

• Twisting celery sounds like breaking bones
• Little toilet plungers plunged on a table sound like a space monster approaching from far away
• Big toilet plungers plunged on a table sound like a space monster approaching from very close!

Then the Magnetic Fields came out, including Merritt on the lute, a cellist, an acoustic guitarist, a pianist/chatterbox, and a girlie singer.  It was really good.  Magic good.  It was just so civilized and wonderful.  You could hear everything so well, the attendees were polite and well-behaved and it allowed you to really really listen and appreciate it.  (No stupid drunk girls to push out of your way, no stupid alpha male assholes trying to start a pit for no reason, etc.)  I consider myself a Magnetic Fields fan, and I have a couple of their albums.  They played around 20-25 songs....and I only knew ONE.  That's how prolific they are, it's ridiculous.  And even though all the songs were new to me, the show was still amazing.  His lyrics could stand on their own apart from the music, they're always so funny and sad and true and clever.  I think my favorite song was the first one they played which was called "I Hate California Girls", although I really liked "Nun's Litany".

Their onstage banter was amusing, too.  I think the best story was when Merritt talked about the first concert he ever went to, which was a Jefferson Airplane show his parents took him to when he was a kid.  He remembered Grace Slick screaming out: "They're killing kids over there!!!!"  In retrospect, he knows she was alluding to the children in Vietnam.  But at that concert, he thought she "meant stage right" and that his death was imminent.

And interesting/confusing sidenote: Stephin Merritt hates applause.  "He typically covers an ear when the audience claps. This is attributed to a hearing problem that Merritt suffers from called hyperacusis, where any sound louder than normal begins to "feed back" in his head at increasingly louder volumes."  At the end of every song he would quickly stick his finger in his ear and wince a bit.  So what to do?  You want to show your appreciation so you want to clap...yet you know that is annoying to him, so you don't want to clap! 

Then that makes you start to think how ridiculous clapping is, and who on earth came up with that idea to whack your hands together to be noisy and that somehow signifies approval?  Humans are weird.

As a young child, my friend Matt wrote and illustrated an amazing fable starring a wolf, a crane, and a dove.  It was ingeniously titled "The Wolf, the Crane, and the Dove."  To read this riveting tale, go here.  Important details to note:

• The wolf is shirtless, and wearing jeans.
• The artist has gone to painstaking efforts to show that they are not just any jeans, but Lee jeans.
• The moral of this fable is "Three can keep a secret if two are dead," which is pretty damn morbid and awesome for a 4th grader.

Matt's birthday was in January, and I really struggled to come up with a good idea for a present for him.  Anytime that happens, I always revert to what I call my "macaroni necklace tactics," and try to make something.  From the heart.  So I decided to make him a needlepoint with the catchphrase from his fabled fable.

First, I had to plan, organize, and graph out the gothic-style letters I nabbed from a needlepointing site.  Back in my Girl Scout craft jamboree days, I would have used map pencils and graph paper.  But I am no longer 1986 Girl Scout Halee.  I am 2008 Web Analyst Halee, so I used Excel:



Then over my Christmas break, I diligently needlepointed the yuletide away.  When Matt's birthday rolled around, I was done with the needlepoint, but hadn't had time to get it framed.  So I threw this piece of fabric at him, and then immediately demanded it back.  Note: I am currently angry with myself for not taking pictures to incrementally document the progress and make a time lapse animated gif. 



Two months later...I finally got around to having it framed and viola!  I was worried that a gray and brown feather didn't really match up with a crane and dove which are typically white.  But then again, Matt's crane and dove were bright orange, so screw it!

John Rhys-Davies

• Traits: Welsh, short, chubby, hairy
• Best known for: being Indiana Jones' sidekick Sallah, and Frodo's dwarf friend Gimli
• Mnemonic device to remember him: John Rhys-Davies looks like Jefferson Davis "Boss" Hogg.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers

• Traits: Irish, hot, perfect lips, perfect body
• Best known for: being hot and perfect in Velvet Goldmine, being the Bend it Like Beckham coach, and his halfway respectable depiction of Elvis considering he's Irish
• Mnemonic device to remember him:  My, my, my Meyers is nice to look at!

Rhys Ifans

• Traits: Welsh, tall, skinny, questionable hygiene, bad teeth
• Best known for: Hugh Grant's weirdo roommate Spike in Notting Hill
• Mnemonic device to remember him: Not necessary.  Just remember he's the one that's NOT Davies or Meyers.

I was recently recruited to be on a flip cup team at work.  I'm not sure how this happened, because I had never even heard of flip cup, much less ever played it.  Last Friday night was the big company-wide Flip Cup Tournament, featuring our team, the "Fourth Floor Horsemen of the Apocalypse." 

For those of you who are not in the know, flip cup is a massive group drinking game.  Each team consists of however many people (10 in our case) and each player has a common-sized Dixie cup.  10 players from one team line up on one side of the table, and go head to head with another team of 10 who are lined up on the opposite side of the table.

You fill your Dixie cup to the first line with beer, so that's approximately 1/4 of a beer.  Then the first person at the end of your table chugs, then sets the bottom of their just-emptied cup on the edge of the table, and pops/taps it to try to make it land on its lid, then repeats until successful.  Then the next person chugs and flips until successful, and so forth.  Once the anchor at the end of the table chugs and successfully flips, they sprint to the leader position and the whole thing starts all over again until the anchor is back in their original spot.  First team whose anchor finishes wins, and that completes one round.

So yes, that means 10 chugs of 1/4 a beer.  So that's roughly 2.5 beers per round.  (And about half that was pure foam.)  We played somewhere from 3-4 rounds.  I honestly don't remember, because I was also sipping beers between rounds.  I would estimate I had about 10-12 beers?  Not counting the beer that I "gave back"?  Author's note: I can usually only handle 5-6 beers. 

It's always amusing to piece together the evidence the following morning:

• My jeans and boots were abandoned right at the front door, along with several sticky notes.
  
• There was trail of Lucky Charms from the kitchen to a corner of the living room where I must have sat to eat them.
• My laptop was in bed with me, open to a streaming episode of "Rob & Big" on mtv.com.

I think my flip cup career may already be over.  All day Saturday I was echoing Murtaugh, hobbling around my house murmuring that I'm "too old for this shit..."