Catullus 5's Journal

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I'm SHOCKED that a Vegas hotel-casino would try to prey on the ignorant and inattentive!
On second thought, the Luxor has the gall to charge a $12 "resort fee" in the fine print beneath their published $50 "rate." Just so they can appear higher in a price-ranked list. They don't even charge you the extra money until you show up at the front desk and get taken by surprise if you didn't happen to catch the fine print. What a cheap scam. Why not go further and make their "rate" $1 and their "fee" $61. So to hell with that place. And a hearty Channel 12 News At Ten Scoundrel Patrol Scolding Of The Week to the Mandalay Resort Group. No other company was pulling this stunt, that I could see.

Nah, just kidding, I also changed my mind because of the price, not just the principle. I would have stayed there if it were $38+12 instead of $50+12. But I opted for the cheap-ass Imperial Palace. It's a bit of a dump, but I couldn't turn down a location that's pretty much dead center for just $30 a weeknight.

Package deal, Air/Hotel/Car/Friends/Freedom
On Friday, I'm flying to California to visit Jenna and my friend Chris from high school. I'll be there for three nights, which is great. Last time I could only stay for one day. Like a mayfly.

Then on Monday, I'll drive the good old Mojave Freeway to Las Vegas.

Our lil $10 weekly game has whetted my appetite, but I haven't played much serious poker because Connecticut is far away, New Hampshire's new poker rooms take a whopping 33% entry fee, and in any event I'm pretty busy. I'm also itching to get back into blackjack and the like. It's been two full years since I last counted a card or spotted a flasher.

(Side tangent. Speaking of beating the casinos, here's a cool trick I've just found out about. Actually, I'm kicking myself for not having the idea myself. I've known about this little "feature" of some playing card designs, but I somehow didn't realize it would be useful. Too bad you need a group of players to really run this play right. And too bad the casino can so easily foil it.)

Hotwire.com is a lot more fun when you find a cheat sheet online. A mysterious "3.5 star hotel in South Strip?" Let's see... Nope, sorry, I looked up what hotel that is and I don't like their parking garage.

I've always wanted to stay in the Luxor pyramid, but I've never even sneaked a ride on the diagonal elevators. This time around, there's a deal at the Luxor for $50 a night midweek. I'm highly tempted to take it. But it's not a slam dunk. The Friday night price is $135, too rich for my blood, so I would end up booking the $50 midweek nights and finding another hotel on Friday. Also, the Imperial Palace is only $30 midweek. The IP may not be as spiffy, especially with its glaring lack of diagonal elevators, but it's $20 times 4 cheaper, and it's much more centrally located than the Luxor.

Maybe I should do what I've always done. Stay at the cheap places downtown for $30 a night or so. Spend $150 instead of $300. That's an extra poker tournament or two I could enter. And besides, the best blackjack is downtown, and the best time to play it is at three in the morning just before you stumble up to your room. But that only works if your room is where the best blackjack is.

Happy Canada Day!
July 1 commemorates the 1867 founding, as a unified country, of the Crown's Northern Dominion, which was eventually abbreviated as "C, eh. N, eh. D, eh."

Two requests for my beer loving friends
I bottled my not-yet-named English bitter last night, and it should be ready for consumption in a couple of weeks. It looks nice and clear, and toasty red. If I finally get the priming rate correct, it should look gorgeous in a glass.

A "bitter" is not actually bitter, so relax, hop-o-phobes. Bitter is the British term for what we Yanks call a pale ale.

I now have over fifty 12-oz bottles' worth of homebrewed beer waiting to be drunk. There's about 33 of the English bitters coming online, 19 Black Orchid vanilla cream stouts, and three or four leftover hefeweizens and Amour Est Eclat cream stout ales.

So my first request is: Help me drink my beer! I can't do it alone!

Second request: What ale should I brew next? I'm taking suggestions. Name a beer or style that you'd like to drink. It's a contest! Enter now! If I pick your suggestion, you'll win your very own bottle of it! In fact, so will everyone else! Just show up at the same party as me and you'll probably end up "winning" a beer! As usual!

Die in the next ten minutes
Billy Mays is dead while Vince the obnoxious Shamwow guy lives free and easy? There is no god.

There's no workaround for lacking tactile feedback.
I gave it a chance, but now it's been four or five months, so I can now safely say I regret buying an iPhone.

The biggest reason is the lack of a real keyboard. Like I said, I gave it a chance. I've been plugging away at the flat glass for months now, but I've never gotten used to it, never stopped being frustrated by the shortcomings. Owners of any other phone probably take for granted, probably never even notice, how convenient it is to type a few characters without looking at the screen. On the Iphone I can't do this even once. I have to stare at it during every single keystroke. It's exhausting. I learned to type without looking at a computer's keyboard by about age seven. But with an Iphone, I'm apparently still six.

And I still make typos all the time, even while constantly staring at the keyboard, even after months of practice. Not to mention the times I spell something correctly and the Iphone "corrects" it wrongly. Such aggressive auto-correction wouldn't even be necessary if the glass keyboard didn't make typos so prevalent.

What the he'll. Duck this shut.

I don't know, maybe I'm phenomenally unskilled and nobody else has this problem. But I doubt it. Can you really type a whole word without looking at the screen? Maybe if you have tiny fingers and the phone lies flat on a table, you could get a few characters in a row.

The wider keyboard in landscape mode doesn't help. And you can't use just one thumb if you do it that way.

Another reason is that Apple is steadily being revealed as an evil empire. The bloom is off the rose. I'm not buying their image as a kind band of genius hippie rebel good-guys anymore, much like I'm not buying Obama's image as a competent policymaker anymore. Apple is all about control of content and control of hardware. You don't own what you download and pay for, and when it comes to apps at least, you can't get them on your own. You have to go through the monopolist. Portable electronics are due for an open source revolution and Apple is the Microsoft of smartphones. I'm starting to feel like a sap and a sucker instead of a power user.

But mainly it's the goddamn keyboard.

I bought an Iphone after I realized that, every day, I found myself thinking "If only I had Web access right now." Well, now every day I think "If only I were typing on a real keyboard right now." Must I go through this for another year and a half? I might actually pay the early termination fee.

Conversation
Commenters on a blog post about social intelligence:

Commenter 1: The real test of social retardation, I'd say, is how a person responds to a greeting of "how are you?" or something similar.

Commenter 2: "But surely I owe you an accurate answer!" (links to this xkcd cartoon)

Commenter 3: The real test of social retardation, then, is an appreciation for xkcd.

Har.

How to deliver every line the same way and get millions of dollars
Wow, a whole movie with Jack Black and Michael Cera! Oh boy! What casting! See, one's boorish and loud, the other's meek and quiet! And yet despite being such polar opposites, they're alike in one crucial way: Neither of them is remotely funny after more than four minutes of their tiresome schtick.

By now, everyone agrees Jack Black sucks, but this Michael Cera douchebag is still popular with audiences for some reason. I wonder if I'm the only one who groans whenever he opens his mouth in a preview. His quiet unchanging mumbling in every scene of every movie doesn't work as either acting or comedy. Superbad was an entire movie where Jonah Hill would do something stupid and Michael Cera would whisper "Oh good... that was very helpful... what you just did." And then something else would happen and he'd mumble "So now we're stranded on the roadside... great... that's... just what I was hoping for." And now we have Year One which looks like the same drudgery but in loincloths. As I like to point out during internet flamewars, it's not good sarcasm if all you're doing is saying the opposite of what you think. Uttering your vague facile sarcasms in Michael Cera's emotionless whisper is even worse.

Especially since he's usually trying to be the straight man in a duo. You need a good foil for that kind of comedy to work. Imagine if Michael Cera were the straight man in Monty Python sketches. "Oh... good... no, this parrot hasn't been nailed to the perch or anything... yeah... an ex-parrot is just what I wanted." It would be terrible. The comedy in that scene comes entirely from John Cleese and the way he reacts. Michael Cera inexplicably gets laughs by not reacting at all above a whisper. And it's the same thing in every scene, every role. Mumble mumble mumble. In Superbad he didn't show me anything beyond what he showed me in scene one. He doesn't even change facial expressions!

Remember Chris Farley's movies? Michael Cera would have been a downgrade from David Spade. And that's saying something.

I wonder whether audiences will eventually get tired of his schtick, like with Jack Black, or whether I'll be a lone iconoclast complaining to nobody for years to come, like with Steve Carell in The Office. (Seriously, it gets old! Nobody is that dumb! The other characters are funnier.)

I am with name
1.

"We'll creep together, you and I... for I know all the small things."

Totally underrated album from back in the day. (Even if nobody else appreciated the Hallo Spaceboy preshow.) I've been listening to it for a few days ever since I quoted a quatrain a few posts back.

2.

I should have known fifteen minutes on line was an unrealistic estimate for meeting and getting a wine bottle signed by winemaker and Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan. It would have taken about an hour so I had to pass. I could have left work early instead, but skipping work to get some rock star's autograph is a tad too irresponsible.

3.

Speaking of autographs, know what would be hilarious? A baseball autographed by Jesus. I'm totally going to make this happen. Anachronism be damned. Is it a sin to forge our Lord's signature?

Recreational insomnia
It all started at work on Friday. I was about to go running at lunch when a slight drizzle fell. And I said: I don't want to run in a slight drizzle. I'll run Saturday morning instead. That way it will still be cool outside, but dry.

I got home at 3 AM Friday night, and happened to pass out on my couch, where direct sunlight abruptly smashed me in the face at precisely 6:03 AM. And I said: I could climb into bed and go back to sleep, and then go running at noon... but what's stopping me from running now and sleeping later? It's cooler now than it will be at any later time.

And so I ran from Cleveland Circle to the Public Garden. And I came back on a Green Line train full of Saturday commuters. It took an hour to get tired again, but then I slept from 10 AM to 1 PM. I wanted to sleep more, but Alex's barbecue was starting. And I said: Barbecues are where it's at. I'm not missing it on account of sleep. I'll have time to nap before Rocky.

And so I went to the barbecue, and it was fun, and I went home and slept from 8 PM to 10 PM. I went to Rocky and performed as Brad before a sizable audience. And after the show, Denny invited folks to his movie theater to watch Up. For a Disney Pixar movie, Up is shockingly melancholy and moving in parts. The five-minute prologue is beautiful and brilliant and sad. I loved it. The movie ended at dawn, and when we stumbled out of the theater, nobody was about. The world was still asleep for one or two more Sunday hours, and the weather was perfectly cool. And I said... actually I don't have any idea what I said. I'd been drinking caffeine and high-gravity beer during the movie and it was affecting my emotions. As did the movie. I had entered a weird state.

And so I ran from Porter Square to Harvard and along the Charles River to Park Street. While listening to soft music. At dawn. It seemed like the right thing to do. And I saw maybe twenty pedestrians total. And a downpour occurred in the last mile or so. I recollected my thinking from Friday, duly noted the irony, and kept running. And I came back soaking on a Red Line train. And eventually I slept from 11 AM to 4 PM.

And I never really felt myself getting obviously loopy or sleep-deprived... but clearly something was happening to me, because I can't believe I decided to stay up all night and go running pseudo-drunk at dawn, in between four irregular sleep segments. I did get the good old feeling of forgetting how many days have elapsed. Which is a rather pleasant feeling, actually. Recreational insomnia. Taking hours of my internal schedule and scattering them like playing cards. It was pretty fun, all told.

Eternal sunshine.
The ex-girlfriend who hated my guts has recently started calling me up, after a year and a half. To my surprise, I found myself able to stay civil in conversation with her. And also to my surprise, when she asked me to come have a drink last Friday to vent about her current boyfriend, I said, what the hell, sure.

When I was on the phone with her, listening to her laugh and be kind and smart and personable, I realized why I'd dated her for so long in the first place. If we were starting from scratch - if she were some stranger having her first conversation with me - I would have fallen for her all over again. There would have been butterflies. I would have spent the whole time on the phone thinking up the right way to ask her out for a drink sometime.

All over again.

All over.

Did I make a mistake?
Do I wish I could date her again?
Even if the answer isn't yes...

...it disturbs me that the questions even come to mind, for the first time, after a year and a half.

Or maybe I'm simply remembering how good it feels to be in something. Not even the end can ruin the beginning and the middle.

Steely resolve is falling from me.
My poor soul, poor bruised passivity.
All your regrets ran rough-shod over me.
I'm so glad that we're strangers when we meet.

And then the weekend showed up without much fanfare.
I've had this icon for several months, but today is the perfect time to use it.

...

Um... I kinda don't have any specific idea for something to write about just now. Irobably should have thought of something before I started composing this LJ post for no reason besides the icon.

So, uh, how's everyone doing?

Good, good.

...

Well, I guess I can link to some stuff I've been reading. Here's one: As meme lemmings would say, Bogus Placebo is Bogus.

Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo biloba for memory. Glucosamine and chondroitin for arthritis. Black cohosh for menopausal hot flashes. Saw palmetto for prostate problems. Shark cartilage for cancer. All proved no better than dummy pills in big studies funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The lone exception: ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea.
...
However, the government also is funding studies of purported energy fields, distance healing and other approaches that have little if any biological plausibility or scientific evidence.

Taxpayers are bankrolling studies of whether pressing various spots on your head can help with weight loss, whether brain waves emitted from a special "master" can help break cocaine addiction, and whether wearing magnets can help the painful wrist problem, carpal tunnel syndrome.

Here are two interesting paragraphs from one of my everyday blog reads. Just to show that not everything I cite has to be argumentative in nature.

The traditional paradigm has this strange dichotomy, in which market behavior is rational and self-interested but policymaker behavior is perfectly altruistic. These idealized constructs are very limiting. Note that the Left tends to complain about the limitations of the rational model of the market actor, while the Right tends to complain about the altruistic model of the policymaker.
...
As Nobel Laureate Robert Fogel points out, in the developed world we are dedicating a smaller share of resources to producing food, clothing, and shelter (including durable goods). The growing sectors of the economy are health care, education, and leisure. The production of food, clothing, and shelter can be well described by using traditional factors of production--labor, land, and capital. Not so with health, educational attainment, and the enjoyment of leisure, where psychological and social factors are important.

But take it from me: You don't have to be on the Left to find yourself complaining about the rational model of the market actor, if that market actor is buying hundred-dollar magnets for carpal tunnel syndrome in the absence of rigorous double-blind testing.

Game Seven is on TV right now. Whoever wins this game will hoist the Stanley Cup. I can only imagine what it's like to be at this game. Go Penguins, I suppose.

Satch n' Friends
Joe Satriani is one of the top ten rock guitarists of all time. And now he's in a supergroup called Chickenfoot, along with Van Halen outcasts Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony, plus Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer and Will Ferrell lookalike Chad Smith.

This sounds really awesome. Joe Satriani rules. Just ask Coldplay (at 0:49). He's impeccably proficient like many other guitar soloists but he's always kept his compositions song- and melody-oriented, his guitar begging and pleading and holding you tight. And I wouldn't mind seeing Sammy Hagar live either, which I never have. I'm not going to hate on the guy just because he doesn't sound like David Lee Roth.

So, I say you should check them out. And I'm not just saying that because Joe Satriani's publicist bought me a Hummer. They're at the Bank Of Your Mom pavilion in August and I'll definitely be picking up a ticket.

Good News, Everyone!
Futurama rises from the dead. 26 new episodes! Mid-2010! ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!

A little bit of everynothing
Last weekend, I...

...Went to Gogol Bordello with Whitney and Amy, where in the VIP section we decadently availed ourselves of our own cocktail waitress with our feet up while the teeming unwashed masses suffered and sweated all over each other below. Next time I'm bringing grapes and a toga.

...Worked two baseball games and got smacked in the arm hard enough to leave a bruise but not hard enough to make me quit the sport like I'm afraid will happen.

...Brewed an English bitter from a recipe that's billed as an Old Speckled Hen clone but calls for way more hops than Old Speckled Hen if you ask me. Not a problem, though. It's high time for some hops after my last three beers which were all pretty malty.

...Stabbed myself in the palm with a Phillips head screwdriver, leaving a deep bleeding X with four little skin flaps like an origami fortune teller.

...Went to Fenway to watch David Ortiz move his bat around the general vicinity of a pitched ball while Daisuke Matsuzaka fondly reminisces about the World Baseball Classic and what it felt like to have a 1-2-3 inning.

...Played poker, got excellent cards, made it to the final two players, and battled Fang heads-up for 48 arduous minutes. In the end I drew the short end of a K10 vs A10 stick. Finally.

I do not prefer writing in this form of unconnected factoids. If there's no real way to tie up the details of my weekend into a cohesive collection that has some kind of theme, or purpose, could that signify an analogous lack of theme and purpose in my life altogether?

Tiananmen Square - bonus tidbit
A different photo of the Chinese guy in front of the tanks had never been published before yesterday. Neat.

Runs
I ran a just-over-5K fun run at work yesterday, and averaged an 8:17 mile over 3.2 miles. That pace is more than a minute faster than any mile I've ever jogged. So that's cool. Of course, as a result of the faster pace, the experience of running sucked a lot more than usual. I started saying "there's no way I'm gonna make this" after only the first half mile - much sooner than usual. So I'm not about to speed it up on a regular basis.

I was also running with a bruised knee and a tweaked hamstring from playing softball in the outfield on Monday. I made maybe my best catch in years of company softball - running straight forward and diving to catch the ball with my glove in the grass and my whole body flat on the ground, plus I had to flip my wrist and catch it backhanded at the last moment... Man, that felt good inside. And it wasn't even the play that messed me up on the outside, either. But two plays later I just slipped while running sideways to grab a base hit, and the ground tried to shove my kneecap to the side, so it's pretty sore. It could have been a lot worse. I really hope I can get back to playing first base where I'm not beaten up after every game.

I fiiiinally started umpiring baseball games. I'd been putting it off because of the Bruins schedule and then found that no games were available until the last few weeks of the Babe Ruth season. I'm going to find a league that runs later so I can do some more. I forgot how much fun it is, when I don't get struck in the arm so hard each stitch leaves a mark. It's quite good money - fifty bucks for under three hours - and for those fifty bucks it's much easier than sprinting around a Pop Warner football field. But varsity football is great. I don't imagine high school baseball can match it.

Tiananmen Square massacre, 20 years ago today
Libertarian blogger/activist Radley Balko strikes the note that ought to be struck:

It was 20 years ago today that the Chinese government killed 2,000 to 3,000 of its own citizens for the crime of demanding their own liberty. This iconic photo is about all that’s left of them.

George Orwell said, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” He’s all too right. Last century, an estimated 262 million people were murdered by their own government. That doesn’t include the hundreds of millions more killed by opposing governments during war.

Today ought to be a day to celebrate and promote human liberty, and to remember the abuses governments have heaped upon their subjects over the centuries.

So go find your own metaphor for the government tank pictured above.

Then put yourself in front of it.

I'm not sure about that statistic, but let's face it, even if he's off by more than half, and it's, say, "only" 100 million killed... I don't think that diminishes the horror or weakens his point in the slightest.

And the George Orwell reference reminds me of another tangential quotation. It's my favorite kind, darkly humorous:

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

-- John Derbyshire*

*A word on ths guy: John Derbyshire is a conservative writer and a curious case. On the whole I cannot be a fan, because there are issues on which I find him borderline offensive (gays especially). But then there are several other issues (such as abortion) where he not only agrees with me but opposes the conservative orthodoxy. I don't know what to make of him. Anyway, regardless of what I think of his views on gays, I can still quote him on a different topic.