Monday miscellany

On January 27, 2014January 27, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Music, Television1 Comment

A whole lot of stuff today, most of which isn’t worth its own post and I don’t want to have 300 posts today anyway, so you get a bunch of bullet points. Enjoy some commentary and a bit of open self-promotion:

The entire northern part of the state is on a travel warning again and school has already been called off for Tuesday. Both my wife and my son are home; we’d have had to pick him up from day care (they closed at noon because of the travel ban) and I had to clear the driveway before getting anywhere was even possible. I figure Wednesday is downgraded to “doubtful” at this point from “I’m sure we’ll be back” earlier today.
Despite the headline of the previous post, I’m actually not upset about the weather, nor am I angry with the various people posting “Awesome out here in California!” or “Hey, it’s 65 degrees here in Florida!” people. I prefer cold weather to hot under all circumstances, period. I admit if I still lived in Chicago, where there’s nowhere to put the damn snow, I’d be miserable, but clearing the driveway every once in a while isn’t actually that big of a hardship– I’d rather plow the driveway than mow the damn lawn any day of the week. That said, I’m growing ill about the lost time before the ISTEP test. I really am going to be writing a letter to the State Board of Education and the State Superintendent to advocate for pushing back the test at least a week. It’ll be interesting to see how contractually bound we are to the dates we’re scheduled to. Pearson doesn’t give a damn about the contract, mind you, but I suspect our state officials will.
The Internet is for porn; everyone knows that. I finally figured out what Twitter is for last night; Twitter is for snark. Watching the Grammys, for example, isn’t terribly exciting (exceptions in a moment). Watching the Grammys and mocking it on the Internet along with half of the world is hilarious. I know I talk about Saladin Ahmed a lot around here, but Christ the guy was on fire last night and it was hysterical.
What Twitter appears to be less good for: driving traffic to websites, at least as far as I can tell. Nobody clicks on links in Twitter. I’ve had blog links retweeted by celebrities three times– Cherie Priest RTed my “10 best books of 2013” post and both Lyrics Born and Lateef retweeted links to yesterday’s post about them (also: Lyrics Born and Lateef the Truthspeaker and Cherie Priest read something on my blog, squeeeeeee) and it led to maybe four hits from Twitter yesterday and maybe six when Priest did it.
That said, I have 93 followers right now and I want 100 today. Follow my twitter feed! There’s a button right over there on the right! I’m funny sometimes, I promise!
Also, I should hit 1,337 blog followers today, which makes my inner Internet nerd happy.
Speaking of naked self-promotion, note the “Short Fiction” page that’s been added to the header up there. If you’re a newer reader there’s a couple of stories up there that you may not have seen. I’ll be beefing this up in the future, especially if the summer writing grant goes through– I find out about that in less than a month.
Back to the Grammys: I don’t usually watch them; the Grammys actually are what people say the Academy Awards are and usually they are best ignored. I’m glad I caught last night’s show, though, if only because it was so amazingly, unashamedly weird. Steven Tyler’s weirdly inappropriate affection made Smokey Robinson want to put on the Ring of Doom and bamf off the stage. Cyndi Lauper was painfully, obviously, amazingly drunk. Pharrell’s hat was just obvious and amazing. The Macklemore/Queen Latifah/Madonna thing was weird and creepy and somehow both massively inappropriate and inspiring at the same time– like, Latifah’s gay, right? Everyone knows that? She’s got a long-term partner. So you have the straight white guy, and it’s not like the Grammys repeatedly recognizing white rappers over more talented black rappers (coughKendrickLamarcough) isn’t already a problem, and he’s rapping about how being gay is great, then you pull out the mostly-closeted gay lady to marry a whole bunch of people, both straight and gay couples and a couple of notably interracial ones as well, and CBS does their damnedest to only focus on the straight couples while it’s happening, and meanwhile Madonna is there for some reason and she’s leaning on a cane and looks older than Betty White.
Somebody– can’t find it right now– said that Macklemore’s unique talent was managing to come off as a douchebag even when he’s being perfectly sincere and saying things you agree with. That’s not far off from the truth, near as I can tell.
The Awkward Taylor Swift Dancing tumblr. You’re welcome.
Good stuff, though: The Pharrell/Daft Punk/Stevie Wonder/Nile Rodgers collaboration was awesome, but holy shit were they overshadowed by the Imagine Dragons and Kendrick Lamar’s mashup of Radioactive and m.A.A.d city
earlier in the show, a performance so outstanding that by rights it should have ended the entire ceremony on the spot. Like, the Grammy people should have just sent everybody the fuck home and released the rest of the awards by email or something. I wasn’t terribly familiar with Lamar before the show; I downloaded his (also Grammy-nominated, but it didn’t win, see above bit on Macklemore) album on the spot. Sadly, I haven’t had time to listen to it yet; I’ll report back. That shit blew me away.
Cutting to that poor little country girl right after the Lamar/Imagine Dragons performance was the cruelest decision of the evening and I can’t believe they did it. They went from a showstopping performance straight to something that was deliberately staged to look like a show in a poorly-attended country bar, complete with lame Christmas lights sewn into clothes and fucking neon cacti, and meanwhile the audience was wiping sweat off their foreheads and going to the bathroom. I may download her album too just out of pity, if she hasn’t retired from music out of sheer embarrassment by now.
My wife and I are both pretty digitally connected people, right? So much so that we can’t really tell each other things that have happened anymore without beginning with the phrase “You’ve probably already heard this, but…”. We had a particularly bad example of this this morning, one that may well be a sign that the two of us need to reevaluate our lives: I cleared off the driveway and let her know that I was going to go take a shower, then as I was drying off afterward she knocked on the door to the bathroom and said “Hey, you probably already know this, but school’s cancelled tomorrow.” Because apparently it is reasonable to my wife that I’m on my phone checking Facebook and Twitter while I’m showering, or that perhaps I check my phone before drying off. Which entertains the crap out of me.
No, shut up, I didn’t know yet.

That’s enough for now. I’m bound and determined to get The Benevolence Archives 5 done today, so you might see another post from that this evening sometime.

Winter Wonderland, if wonderlands sucked

On January 27, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized8 Comments

Woke up to the sound of a bathroom door shutting and realized that the wife and son were still in the house after all– there’s ten damn inches of blown snow in the driveway and the county’s under a travel watch again. So have some pictures of my back yard through a window.

In which being old is bad until it isn’t anymore

On January 26, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Parenting1 Comment

Latyrx If you’ve been reading for a while you probably have an idea that my music tastes are pretty catholic; I listen to all sorts of shit, but my heart has always been with hiphop. I enjoy flooring my students with this; I suspect fat old white dudes aren’t exactly the demographic they associate with rap music, although I do lose some cred as soon as they figure out that I don’t listen to a single artist any of them have heard of, although I’m fond of pointing them toward good shit whenever I can.

Those two gentlemen there are Lyrics Born and Lateef the Truthspeaker, and they are two of the greatest rappers alive at the moment. They both do solo work but together they’re a duo called Latyrx. (Easier to pronounce than you think; mix the first syllable of “Lateef” with the last syllable of “Lyrics.”) Their appropriately-titled second album, The Second Album, came out not too long ago. It’s fucking brilliant. Go buy it.

They did a show in Chicago last night. I didn’t go. I didn’t even try. Guys, it killed me to pass up a chance to see this show; I’ve not been a huge fan of some of the live hiphop shows I’ve seen/heard in the past (Tupac’s live album is an embarrassment to music itself, and I love Tupac) but LB has actually already released a live album and it’s magnificent. There’s no way these two don’t put together an awesome show. But… leave my lovely wife and the kid here, drive to Chicago in twenty below bullshit weather, stand in line outside for the show in– again– twenty below bullshit, see the show, then stay the night in Chicago somewhere and come home? Ehh…

(And speaking of twenty below bullshit, these guys are both from the Bay area. They took the stage in full winter coats and hats. I find that hilarious.)

I did a bit of mourning, honestly. Then I started seeing Tweets this morning from the two of them from just before midnight (my time) that were saying things like “about to go on stage!” and I did a little bit more, because I went to bed a bit after midnight last night (we had a couple of friends over for game night) and it nearly killed me. No way I can survive a show that doesn’t even really get started until that late; not anymore. I’m too damn old. Which is sad and moderately embarrassing. Oh well. Maybe they’ll release the show.

Guess what. Livestream of the entire show. Bam.

And I can watch the entire damn thing from my comfy office chair or my TV tomorrow, since due to the aforementioned twenty below bullshit I’m off work again. I love the Internet. I get to see the show and I got to actually get some sleep and spend last night with my family.

Maybe being ancient isn’t so old after all. 🙂

In which two thumbs up, would watch again

On January 26, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Television5 Comments

Unknown The boy has abruptly shifted his educational TV priorities in the last few days, suddenly becoming an ardent devotee of PBS Kids’ Dinosaur Train. I can’t say I mind; I’ve seen every episode of Sesame Street aired since 2008 fifteen times by now and something new is hella welcome.

If you’re child free, like a sensible person, or your kids are older than toddler age, you might not be familiar with the premise of this show. It’s a fascinating mix of science and nonsense; the idea is that the orange tyrannosaur in the middle there, whose name is Buddy, because of course it is, was randomly discovered in the pteranodon nest along with the three baby pteranodons behind him, and when they all hatched at the same time Mama pteranodon just sorta shrugged and decided she had four kids.

One of whom is supposed to eat the other three. Plus her. And daddy pteranodon. There is an episode where Buddy discovers he’s a T-Rex, right? He discovers that he’s supposed to be a carnivore (he eats “carrion,” which is an undifferentiated lump of meat-lookin’ stuff not unlike what Chicken McNuggets are made of, which begs the question of what the hell he’s been eating since hatching) and that he’s eventually going to be very very big. Left alone is the fact that he eats other dinosaurs. The episode we just watched featured the kids talking to an ankylosaurus who declared that his heavy armored plates were to keep him safe from other carnivorous dinosaurs “who might want to hurt me,” and the phrase, “…like you” was conspicuously omitted from the end.

Also, there is the titular “dinosaur train,” which is full of all sorts of dinosaurs and travels around to “T-Rex Town” and “Triceratops Town” (probably not their actual names but you get the idea) and apparently travels through time as well– they actually acknowledge that they’re heading to the “Cretaceous Age” or the “Jurassic Age” from time to time– technology that I’d love to have access to.

The thing, though, is that everything else is awesome, and it ain’t like I’m enough of a dick to actually be offended by the show using Buddy as a non-homicidal protagonist; it just entertains me. They don’t skimp on the complicated names of the dinosaurs (there’s a funny bit at the end of each show where they show four or five kids trying to pronounce the names of things) and they manage to pack a legitimately impressive amount of scientific information into every episode. Plus there’s a guy who calls himself Dr. Scott who shows up at the end of every episode who is either an actual paleontologist or an actor portraying one who gives two or three minutes of detailed information about the dinosaurs that were portrayed in the episode.

And then there’s “Point of Fact!” guy, who wins the show. Sometimes “Point of Fact!” guy walks through a drawing of a door on Dr. Scott’s stage and declares that, as a Point of Fact, no, hadrosaurs did not actually arrange concerts where they played their fluted crests, as portrayed in the episode you just watched. This always terribly disappoints the children listening to Dr. Scott, and then he follows up with a related actual fact and makes them happy again.

And then– and I swear this isn’t a joke– PoF Guy goose-steps his way back off the screen. It’s ridiculous. And hilarious.

Dinosaurs, science, goose-stepping Nazi pedants. Everything I want in a children’s show.

In which I bake!

On January 25, 2014January 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking3 Comments

I was gonna post a picture of the mangled mess my soft pretzels became, but, uhh…

Turns out it didn’t matter.

In which I want to do things I don’t want to do, or vice versa, I’m not sure

On January 25, 2014January 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy10 Comments

ghibli_whispersdvdsleeve Sitting on the couch in the living room right now, watching the snow outside, which has been stuck on “whiteout” for the past half hour or so. I’m listening to Johnny Cash entertain a bunch of convicts at Folsom Prison in 1968. The boy’s taking his nap, the dogs are sacked out and content. There’s an enormous book about World War II next to me waiting for me to get back to it. All in all, not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

The Cash is playing through my Apple TV. When you’re listening to music, it plays a screen saver. I got tired of looking at the nature pictures it plays and just for the hell of it told it to start showing me movie posters as a screensaver. I’ve been sorta idly watching them as they’ve scrolled across my screen. And then it hit me: I really miss watching movies. There were several years in my life, most of the time I was living in Chicago, in fact, where I was seeing 40-45 movies a year.

I have not seen a single movie nominated for an Academy Award this year. Not one. And of the nine Best Picture nominees, I only have a haziest idea of the plot of five. I’ve never even heard of Philomena, Dallas Buyers’ Club or Nebraska. And there are lots of movies that I’m seeing posters for that at least pass the initial “that looks interesting” test.

(Sidenote: poster for 3 Days to Kill just spun past. When did Kevin Costner turn into Tom Selleck?)

I don’t remember the last time I saw a movie in a theater that didn’t have at least one Avenger in it, and that kind of makes me sad. And, to make it worse, it’s not like I don’t have all kinds of access to movies– I can stream damn near anything I want a few months after it hits theaters, and you best believe my iTunes wish list, which I’m using as a “Watch this!” queue, is chock full of stuff– I’m just not doing it. This could turn into a typical new-parent “get a babysitter/pay the babysitter/pay for the movie/pay for dinner/night costs $150” rant, but it’s not that. I have time to watch movies if I want. I just don’t. My priorities have shifted. And it’s a weird feeling, knowing that I want to do something, and I have the opportunity to do something, and that I’m just not going to. For no clear reason.

Anyway, that’s all. I could go get my DVD of The Maltese Falcon out of the rack in my office and watch it now, like I’ve kinda wanted to since rereading the book a month ago. What’ll probably happen is that I’ll clean up the living room or read something and keep on listening to Johnny Cash. I dunno why.

Vortextual analysis

On January 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, Uncategorized8 Comments

So, this is the “before” image, only taken from outside with the sun out rather than through my dining room window:

(Man. That was literally a hipshot; I had my headphones on, with the cord running through my hoodie, and rather than untangle everything I just pulled my phone out of my pocket, pointed it at the snow at more or less waist height and took the picture. It came out prettier than a lot of deliberate photos I’ve taken. Wow.)

After looks like this:

I really hadn’t realized when I went to bed last night how bad the snow was going to be; if I had, I’d have gotten out there and cleared the couple of inches that were already on the driveway, since that older compacted snow made getting rid of the newer stuff twice as annoying.

That said, this is mostly blown snow and not new-fallen snow; note that it was six or seven inches deep against the garage (which you can’t see in either picture) but really thin off to the right over there, and toward where the driveway meets the street there was probably an eight or nine inch swing from the left side of the driveway to the right. Some of that is going to be because the street got plowed before I got out there, but this measure was taken quite a distance from the road:

Judging from the weather reports for the next few days, I’d be really surprised if I was back at school before Wednesday of next week, since Monday and Tuesday’s cold are supposed to make yesterday look mild– and it was definitely temperature that closed us yesterday and not snowfall.

Anybody want to help me start campaigning with the state to push the ISTEP test back a couple of weeks? Extra school days in June really don’t help anybody. I need the time before the test– at this point I’d almost rather lose Spring Break; at least that would give me some class days before the multiple choice administration of the test. I just hope I stay healthy for the spring; I’m not going to be able to lose a single minute between now and ISTEP.

Shit.