Category: Weird

Second Life = Get-A-Life

I’m trying, really trying to buy into the whole Second Life phenom, but two visits and I won’t be going back. Aside from the lag factor — doubtlessly due to my PC and my internet connection — I don’t get a ton of enjoyment walking aimlessly around a Myst-like landscape, altering the length of my nose, building 3-d cones, and chatting via the keyboard with other inhabitants who seem to spend most of their time worrying about their appearance and IMing each other.

I’ll give it another try, but I like my community in words, not pictures. Clicking on the fine print and seeing that Linden Labs was serious about policing the use of illegal trademarks, and the ranks of politically correct recycling bins to throw away my trash made the whole experience feel like some weird Big Brother Space. Cyberspace is too clean. I want dysfunction. Dirt in the corners. Spiderwebs on the ceiling.

I am too old for this stuff and my time is too valuable to hang out in the metaverse building “prims” and figuring out how to make money and build my virtual pad. If sex was involved — and you know someone is going to build OrgyLand — then a business model will emerge.
Flying was kind of cool for a few seconds. Seeing other get-a-lifers cruising through the sky was very weird too. It all cries out for a BFG, rocket launcher, and Duke Nukem dialogue.

I had to erase my 12-year old son’s copy of World of Warcraft. Six months and the kid was getting haunted by the game, putting hours into it at a time. It’s sad to see someone get sucked into an online experience — it’s happened to me — and realize, as the man said, “If you plant ice, you’re gonna harvest wind.”

BBC NEWS | Americas | Snake bursts after gobbling gator

BBC NEWS | Americas | Snake bursts after gobbling gator

While we’re on the topic of food ….

mann thoughts » Blog Archive » The yawning affect

mann thoughts » Blog Archive » The yawning affect

This is too true. Whenever anyone around me gets a phone call on their cell phone, I reflexively reach for mine. Why? Being left out of the conversation? Ever yawn in a dog’s face and see what happens? They also yawn. Some sort of sympathetic limbic response.

I am back on US soil, on way to Phoenix. Blogging resumes tonight.

This is what Flash was invented for …

http://www.shockabsorber.co.uk/bounceometer/shock.html

Basically, a tool for determing what kind of sports bra one should wear according to chest size and the intensity of the activity. I offer this only as a public service. Thanks to C.D. for the link.

Photo of the day

Chaos at the airport

T.F. Green airport in Providence, RI was pure lunacy this morning. A bazillion Clampetts and Kettles heading for the bus in the sky to get themselves south for the winter. I think it was some weird harmonic convergence of spring break, March Madness, and my bad luck of taking a late flight instead of the usual 6 am dawn patrol.

Utter suckfest. Because the lines were so long I couldn’t check my bag, and in my bag was my Swiss Army knife/USB drive/key chain.

Busted. Got away with the drive and the keys. Goodbye knife. Like I was going to rush the cockpit with a 1.5″ pen knife. Then I discovered, when I took off my shoes for the metal detector, this gem from dressing in the dark. The TSA lady was horrified.
Now I think I understand why the news staff at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune gave me clothing as a going away present in 1984. Something about hemming my pants with a Swingline Stapler.

Holy Argyle!

YouTube – microsoft ipod packaging parody

YouTube – microsoft ipod packaging parody

I am loving You Tube more and more every day.

BTW: WTF happened to Google Video?

Embarassing Days on the Job

In 2002 I worked for an entrepreneur from Liechtenstein who was the chairman of an international charity devoted to preventing drug abuse by children. He hosted the annual trustees meeting at his Italian villa on Lake Lugano — right on the border between Italy and Switzerland — and invited me to attend so I could present the organization’s annual report.
The trustees were a pretty powerful group of people — the President of Colombia, an ex-Formula One race car driver, a McKinsey director, Nino Cerutti (the men’s fashion designer), and assorted European royals, including the head of the charity, the Queen of Sweden. Having never actually met royalty, I fretted beforehand about the proper form of address one used when greeting a queen. Your Majesty? Your Royal Highness? Your Serene Highness? Anyway, the meeting was held, a nice lunch was enjoyed, and by-and-by the Queen had to leave and take a limo to Milan for the flight back to Stockholm. Everyone lined up in the hallway of the villa to say good-bye — a reverse receiving line I suppose — and I took my place next to Nino Cerutti, who had correctly identified my gabardine suit as being one of his designs, pointing out archly to me that it was obviously off-the-rack (I didn’t have the heart to tell him I stole it for $200 from Filene’s Basement) but I’m very much a slob when it comes to clothes, yet I liked that suit a lot.

The Queen’s bodyguards went ahead of her Highness to check out the security situation while she made her way down the line of guests and said her goodbyes, one-by-one. As the security team passed in front of me I had to take a step backwards to get out of the way. The Queen was three people away, then two people away, surrounded by my hovering, obsequious boss. Then she was right there, saying goodbye to Nino and air-kissing him on the cheeks three times. (I never got that air kiss thing down. Left-right-left? Right-left-right? Make contact? I always end up smashing heads or doing something inappropriate like actually making kissy sound effects.)

Sensing I might lick her cheek,  the Queen took my hand in both of her’s, looked me in the eyes, spared me the air-kiss and told me what a pleasure it had been to meet me. I’m sure it was, as I had been kept far away from her during the meeting and lunch, but she was very nice and a very attractive woman so I was charmed and got ready to say, “Thank you, your Highness” but I noticed something was very wrong with my back. Right below my right shoulder blade. Wrong and getting wronger. Like, holy shit, I’m on fire kind of wrong.

The security team had backed me into a big candle on an iron sconce and I was now ablaze.

I let go of the Queen’s hand and disrobed. I grabbed the collar of the suit coat and pulled it over my head right in front of her. She backed away in terror.

“Are you alright?” she shouted most un-serenely as I threw my coat on the floor and stomped out the flames. Nino Cerutti slapped out the flames on my smoldering shirt with his bare hands. The smell of burning wool filled the hallway. I am grateful the Swedish Secret Service didn’t gun me down on the spot.

“Quite alright,” I managed to say with perfect aplomb. The woman to my right, the teenaged daughter of the President of Colombia, was horrified and out of sympathy for my plight (or distraught to miss her big moment), she started weeping. The Queen consoled her and I took the opportunity to put the suit coat back on before my boss could see my thermonuclear lapse in etiquette. Too late. He wound up having his lackey fire me over the phone a few months later. I was forever in the penalty box after desecrating his royal moment.

“I think you need a new suit,” Mr. Cerutti said after the Queen was hustled to her car.

“Hook me up, Nino,” I said. He never did, even though it was a Nino Cerutti suit.
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to keep my back to the wall, smelling like burnt hair.  I still have pieces of the coat in the garage, serving as a bike chain degreaser as a reminder of my brush with royalty.

On roadside memorials …

I’m waiting for some feckless shutterbug to publish a coffee table book of roadside shrines — those crosses that pop up alongside the interstate to mark the spot where some loved one breathed their last — and expect to immediately find it on the bargain table for $2.99. Heck, I’d write it myself except for the act of hauling over into the breakdown lane, popping on the emergency flashers, and risking my own life as the 18-wheelers whizz past just to take a picture of two pieces of wood, a garland of plastic flowers …

I first saw roadside shrines in Puerto Rico — apparently its part of the Hispanic culture to mark the tarmac where the bus plunged or the publico had its last chance power drive. Busy intersections and treacherous curves are veritable Arlington cemetaries, forests of white perpindicular planks that are more effective than Slippery When Wet signs for warning of dangers ahead.

About a decade ago they began to pop up around southeastern Massachusetts, primarily around New Bedford, a big Portugese-American enclave. Some local attorney had been taken away for offing some junkie hookers and dumping their bodies in the ditch (New Bedford is also the home of the infamous Big Dan’s Tavern, home of the pool table where the poor woman played by Jodie Foster in The Accused was raped) and I always wondered if some of the crosses were meant to memorialize his victims. Gruesome thought, but now that bucolic stretch from Wareham to Fall River is still creepy as can be thanks to the crosses.

It is strange to read a newspaper account of a particularly tragic car accident and then see, for years afterwards, the trio of little crosses that mark the spot where as wrong-way drunk wiped out a young family. And that’s the point. My father died in a head on crash on Route 130 in Mashpee just past the spot where the highway crosses under the approach path for the runway at Otis Airforce Base. I didn’t erect a cross. But I did seek the spot out the day after the accident, finding it by discovering the detritus and trash the EMTs had left behind by the roadside.

Roadside memorials went official after a state trooper was gunned down by a desperado on Route 3 in Kingston, right by where the old Howard Johnson’s stands by the muddy banks of the Jones River. It’s a big honking pink granite monument in memory of Trooper Mark Charbonnier. Apparently roadside memorials are illegal in many states, but the road crews always seem to mow carefully around them out of respect.

There are many resources about roadside memorials online. The most irreverent is PorkJerky.com — and therefore the funniest, or as the author says, “Funnier than a Retard on Fire.”

It contributes this image to the forthcoming coffee table book project:

There is a book on Amazon, Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture which will not be getting the One-Click treatment from me this evening.

As for my decision not to get out of my car to take pictures of memories, Mr. PorkJerky tells this cautionary tale:

“Here’s the gist: Jeff Frolio, a cameraman for the ABC affiliate in Omaha (KETV 9) was getting some stock footage of dangerous intersections in the Omaha area. Can you see where this is heading? Well, it happened. As Jeff was walking back to the news van he gets plowed. And where did it occur? That’s right, at a dangerous intersection in the Omaha area. Specifically, 220th and West Center, exactly in front of the Wilkins and Alfrey memorial which moments early he was shooting. That intersection is so dangerous in fact, the driver who hit Frolio wasn’t charged with a thing.”

I should get onto more important things. Like using Mr. Jerky’s interactive build-your own memorial tool.