'Bred Crumbs
10.26.02
Boy, does this not help the image of war protestors:
The first major injury involved with today's anti-war protest in San Francisco has sent two people to a hospital with critical head injuries stemming from an accident inside the Broadway tunnel.
According to San Francisco Fire Department Lt. Barry Wong, a man and woman who are in their 40s were riding in a converted school bus to the demonstration at about 11 a.m. when the accident occurred.
The full-size school bus has the body of a Volkswagen van welded to its roof, which Wong said adds about six feet to the vehicle's overall height. The man and woman were riding with their heads and bodies sticking out through the van's sunroof when it passed through the tunnel heading eastbound.
"It's an extremely tall vehicle," Wong said.
You can guess the rest.
Monday's episode of Fear Factor will feature a gay contestant. I presume at some point he will be lowered into a vat of naked women.
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Peculiar headline of the day, from The Winnipeg Sun via Google News:
10.24.02
Nothing shows what a mess English is than seeing someone who is new to the language trying to apply its numerous rules and methods regularly, and producing something that doesn't exist. In a forum I visited today, I read this:
Firstable, sorry for my english because I am french.
10.23.02
Two young women on The Amazing Race are identified as "Law School Roommates." Hey, isn't that a David E. Kelley series?
"Whatever else you may think of it, it made the town look beautiful. ... It was sunlit. It was always autumn. I wish I lived there."
– Providence Journal TV writer Andy Smith, about NBC's just canceled Providence
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During this morning's aggravating trip to work, fouled by three wrecks on or near the Bay Bridge, an additional obstacle was an apparent bubble-wrap spill. Yard-thick rolls of bubble wrap were strewn across the lower deck. The weird thing is, we all carefully drove around them.
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For those of you who thought I exaggerated my impressions of the misguided American cap, or who could not bear my barely refrigerator-worthy diagrams of it, I have now added an actual image of the cap, caught on digital video by Robbie. Go look.
I had planned to just not give a damn about the World Series happening in my town, but I am now forced to choose a rooting interest, and not the home team, because, well, there's just been too much monkey bashing around here.
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Meanwhile, entire ATMs are being stolen in Detroit and Indianapolis.
10.22.02
[I]n the United States Senate these days, Mrs. Clinton has become known as anything but the star of the show. She is the celebrity senator who is forever offering to bring a colleague a cup of coffee, or volunteering to sit in as presiding officer in the deserted chamber on a Friday night, or stepping back at news conferences to let other senators speak. ...
"The thing that has impressed me is sitting down at our Tuesday caucus meeting and watching her get up to get coffee and ask the other senators whether she could bring them back some coffee," said Senator John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana.
The emphasis is mine in these excerpts from a New York Times report on the progress of Hillary Clinton, because it concerns me: does the governance of our country really depend so much upon who gets the coffee?
10.21.02
Some of my Orlando anecdotes had to await my return home because they required visual aids. This is one.
In the row in front of me at Disney/MGM Studios' Indiana Jones stunt show, an older, Midwestern-seeming man wore a PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN baseball cap. It wasn't a bad idea simply because it was tacky, garish, and jingoistic. A bigger problem was that, besides the slogan and randomly placed shiny red stars, the cap featured red stripes running around the sides of the cap, as follows:
Unfortunately, when viewed from above – even just one amphitheater row above – this supposedly pro-American pattern comes out like this:
Maybe the cap's wearer had a stronger sense of satirical irony than I'm giving him credit for.
[Addendum 10.23.02: Here's an image of the real thing. See?]
10.20.02
Robbie and I are having a fine time at Chez Aqua and environs. We arrived just as Orlando's longer-than-usual summer finally relented; temperatures Thursday night dipped into the high 60s, which several bar-goers used as a flimsy excuse to don sweaters. (Even Dewayne said he considered long sleeves that night.)
The trip has been mainly theme parks by day, bars by night. New friends have been made and weirdness observed. Thursday night, we saw a cluster of three young gay men and a heavily drugged young woman. The woman kept wanting to bump and grind with the guys. Occasionally, one would humor her for a few minutes, but you could tell that all they got out of it was laughs at the expense of her trashedness. When the boy of the moment would tire of the game, the woman would dance with herself in the wall mirror; she clearly thought she was great fun. I imagined the prelude to all this was a conversation that went like this:
"Bobby, your sister's all coked up again. I need you to watch her tonight."
"Aw, Mom, I was going to go gay-bar-hopping with Chad and Matthew."
"Well, take her with you. I had to order these Cirque du Soleil tickets months ago."
The only thing sadder that night was the attempted Discover-card transaction reported by Dewayne, who also provides pictures of our less sordid entertainment.
Another feature of the bar scene is Calfornian Kryponite, a k a cigarette smoke. Because of my state's legislated hatred of smoking in public places, I have become more sensitive to it then I realized, despite growing up in tobacco land. At Parliament House last night, the smoke was so thick it traveled in packs. Originally, I resisted the California ban on smoking in bars, but you know what? Air is good.
Yesterday brought a return trip to my favorite Central Florida park, Universal's Islands of Adventure. This time, there were no truly stalkworthy superheroes; the representatives of Spider-man, Wolverine, and the rest were all padding-enhanced, although Captain America was impressively tall and had a cute snaggletooth smile.
Regarding the parks, let us praise one of the greatest innovations of recent years, the Single Rider Line, in which a ride's cars are filled out with people willing to be separated from their contingents; these volunteers in turn get to wait in a (usually) much shorter line. We rode the Spidey ride twice, getting in within 15 minutes both times as opposed to the hour standard wait. But let's keep this secret between us, shall we? It'll just spoil things if everybody knows. As it is, there's one other IOA time-saving trick I'm sworn to secrecy not to report. And you can't torture it out of me. Not even with cigarette smoke.
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