Spring Cleaning

Often I’ll start writing a blog post, but then, be it due to dwindling internet connectivity or a long side track of computer programming, I’ll stop, often in mid-sentence, and save it for later. Well, later doesn’t always come, and this post is a spring cleaning of sorts.

New writing is in italics.

I think I am in love…

…with Adelaide, but she doesn’t even know my name.

I am in Adelaide, I arrived at a fortuitous time. On the heels of summer, in the midst of the Adelaide Film Festival, and on the fringe of the Fringe festival. Couple this with the fact that my host Carolyne is spectacular (despite the infrequent and sparse time we’ve had together) and here I find myself savoring every film’s end credits…

This love fest was about Adelaide, but I ran out of internet time, and besides, I didn’t want to spend any more time in front of the computer when I could be on the streets of Adelaide!

A Day Without Coffee

In an effort to reset my schedule, a task that a younger self would accomplish by simply foregoing a night of sleep, I did not drink any coffee today. I am fairly certain the caffeine half-life in my body is much longer than the average…

In this post I was playing with a toy model that estimated the amount of caffeine in me. I used the half-life of caffeine and my typical use to estimate how much would build up in me after a given period of time.

Death to Tinman

In the long meandering vein that began with Fritz Lang and whose best contemporary has to be Guy Maddin…

In this post I was going to say at lot more about experimental films with creative narratives, but stopped way short… it was all a means to share this awesome film.

Hiroshima Mon Amour

I started writing this post a while ago, I wanted to write about the atomic bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the state of the nuclear arms today. It looks like Scientific American’s latest issue has beaten me to the punch.

This post was preempted before! I was going to talk about the film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, too, and work in these images…

Endangered: Foreign Films

The New York Times has a short article in today’s paper on foreign films. I couldn’t agree more with story.

The same approach big film houses have towards the foreign film market is also destroying the independent american film. Even the Little Theatre has failed to draw me with their “independent” films.

I was trying to get a hold of the former director of the Little Theatre when this article came out (way back in 2006!) to talk about it with him, but all my attempts were fruitless!

aitch too oh

I drink water like it is going out of style.

This has been a life-long trait. I know what it feels like to have drank too much water, yet I don’t know what it feels like to completely quench my thirst. That is to say, when I have drank myself to sickness, I prudently await the moment when it subsides, even the slightest bit, so I can drink some more. Spoken like a true hydrophile.

Another result of this everlasting thirst is having to pee frequently. This has also been a life-long trait. Some of my most memorable moments involve me having to pee. Like that time in catechism when my teacher refused my repeated requests to let me go to the bathroom, complete with my little legs pinched together accompanied by that little hopping motion that isn’t actually a hop (this keeps us from peeing, how?). She refused one time to many, I relieved myself in class, and she was subsequently relieved from our class. Don’t come between a boy and his bladder.

For a long time, historians believed that 16th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe died because he held in his pee for too long at a dinner party¹. My friend told me about this once, it was probably a response to me going on and on about having to pee, she probably said something like, “Don’t have a Tycho Brache moment.” then explained after seeing my puzzled look. Since then, I’ve increased the urgency I feel when the urge to purge arises. It can be ridiculous at times. Like that time I probably spent a total of two quarters of a basketball game at or near the bathroom because a) I downed a 64 oz coke before the game had even started, b) I was drinking the ice in the 64 oz cup as it melted, which created a steady and abundant supply of refreshing cold water, and c) bathroom lines at sporting events are the worse.

Anyway, just sharing.

Australian Fotos

Are they Australian fotos? They hail from Australia, but they were not taken by an Australian, so maybe they are just Australia fotos? Sigh. They are all moderate degrees of lame, and you can find them all at this link:

but below are my favorites:

A Bus Stop Bench in Sydney

It Was a Gas, in Brisbane

The Garden of Unearthly Delights in Adelaide

Gum Trees Seeking Their Estranged Brethren

The Great Ocean Road

The Water Hole in Melbourne

The State I Am In

I am taking a class this quarter. It has been nearly two years since the last class I took. I know this because when I went to write the date on my notes, I wrote "2007". It struck me as odd for many reasons. First, the innocuous possibility that the blank sheet in front of me, with the crease down the middle to help me plan my writing, and the faint trace of the text showing through from the opposite side–I take notes on old single sided printed material in an effort to recycle–which further aids my writing and it’s pleasant alignment, that these factors would come together and trigger in my mind the automatic writing of "2007". But then there is the more frightful possibility that I have not acknowledged the intervening year(s). This later possibility crushed the momentary delight I took in the first possibility. Indeed, I have noticed that my sense of time has been off. So much so that the last year seems more like five, while at the same time, to me, 2008 hasn’t happened. Sigh…

<musical interlude>

Its so hard to go into the city
cause you wanna say hey I love you to everybody
When we were teenagers we wanted to be the sky
Now all we wanna do is go to red places
And try to stay outta hell

Cat Power, Colors and The Kids (YouTube)
</musical interlude>

The class is extragalactic astronomy, not really my bag, but interesting for sure. Shamefully, I never knew (or maybe I forgot) that our Milky Way galaxy had four spiral arms, or that cosmologists have so gallantly casted off baryonic matter in their simulations of the formation and structure of the universe in favor of the exotic and ironic dark matter. That’s right, dark matter is ironic, you heard it here first.

<musical interlude>

I’m just sitting here wasting my time
Till you come home from your escapades
In the back yards with your friends of late

Hayden, Woody (YouTube with a funny story)
</musical interlude>

Musical interludes rock. These songs are from a personal mix I made that features the song entitled The Medication is Wearing Off from the Eels three times in the forty-five minute playlist! It is a moderately dark and depressing mix that I use to make me happy. The spacing of the musical interludes is an indication of how long it takes me to hunt-and-peck type a blog post on my teeny tiny ipod touch.

The Art of Travel

I’ve been reading Alain De Botton’s The Art of Travel, and I love it. I couldn’t agree more with everything I’ve read so far. He really captures the essence of what it is like when I am traveling, from the troubling little quirks of the past that hold you to your life and your self, to the grandiose desires and schemes hatched while standing in front of an otherwise nondescript red door in Amsterdam. The book is interspersed with relevant quotes and anecdotes from a range of authors and personalities since antiquity, a range that implies how avid a reader and researcher De Botton must be. If you like to travel and have traveled (emphasis because if you haven’t traveled a bit, I don’t think you would find the book as engaging; I’m not being snooty, just cautious and I may be wrong since I can only view the book from my preconditions), I recommend you read this book. (Cue the sound effect played after a kid gives you an expert recommendation on Reading Rainbow.)

Some quotes:

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape.

…

At the end hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves–that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.