Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.
I need to set up a “fifteen minutes” category…
New York Post: YOU’RE FIRED!
Last October, Michael Hanscom had a job with Microsoft and a blog. Then he posted a photo he’d taken – at work, of a delivery of Macintosh computers – alongside the comment, “It looks like somebody over in Microsoft land is getting some new toys.”
Within days, he was left only with the blog.
(via Anil Dash)
Many congratulations to Casey and Jennifer, who became the proud parents of Katarina Anne Scott on the 19th!
iTunes: “One” by Die Krupps from the album Cyber Core Compilation (1994, 5:01).
Need some exercise? Just go to a Howard Dean appearance should he come through your town. I swear, with the number of standing ovations after every major point Dean makes, his supporters are up and down more often than your average Episcopal congregation!
Not that that’s a bad thing, of course. It just amused me during today’s Town Hall meeting with Gov. Dean.
The event wasn’t due to start until 3pm, with the doors to Town Hall scheduled to open at 2:15, but after my meeting with the property manager I poked my head out the window and noticed that there was already a pretty sizeable line starting to wrap around the building. It was already 1:30, so I tossed on my coat and headed down to snag a spot. Even then, I didn’t find the end of the line until it had already turned two corners and was around the back of Town Hall, and it was only a few more minutes before it wrapped around the third corner.
Of course, it wasn’t long after that that the line wrapped completely around the block. I saw a few people who came up to the line, started walking around the building trying to find the end, and eventually ended up right back where they started, swearing up and down that there was no end to the line! Just a möebus strip of Dean supporters surrounding the building.
Eventually, the doors opened, and we started heading in. They were taking it slow, though, in order to prevent overcrowding, and only letting about 20 people in at a time. This ended up working out well — at one point I was standing by the side of the building, right next to the back doors. Suddenly I heard people start shouting “Howard!” I turned around, and there he was, getting out of a rental van and heading into the building. He paused for a moment to wave and shake a few hands (which I was just too far away to take advantage of), and then headed into Town Hall.
Once in, there were tables set up to let us register for next week’s Caucuses, and once done with that, we filed into the main hall. There things got a little goofy, as it was already crowded, and it became fairly difficult to find a seat, but it all worked out in the end. We ended up filling the upstairs hall to capacity plus standing room only (over 1000 people in the room), and had a large amount of overflow crowd watching via monitors downstairs.
Congressman Jim McDermott came in first to rousing applause, and after a short speech from him and a woman member of SEIU, Dean came up and took the stage. As this was officially a Town Hall Meeting about health care, he split his appearance into two parts. The first half was the “motivational” stump speech section, and for the second half he took some questions about his policies and plans. He handled himself quite well for both of these.
First off, a quick apology — I didn’t think to bring along anything to take notes with, and as I have a mind like a steel trap (rusty and illegal in thirty-seven states), I can’t remember all the details of his plans and everything he said. I did like what I heard, I just can’t retain any of it for more than about thirty seconds. The retention capability of a goldfish, that’s me. So, what follows is more general impressions than “this particular part of his plan impresses me” reporting.
During the stump speech part, he came across as more of an “official” candidate — still just as charismatic as ever (which I think is one of his greatest strengths when he can make an in-person appearance, though it doesn’t always show as much in interviews), but more subdued than he’s come across as (or has been portrayed as) recently. The crowd was still very responsive and very supportive, too, jumping to their feet and applauding for his points, and hissing and booing as he ran through the litany of all that Bush has done for us. While the media may be doing their best to damn Dean to oblivion, he definitely still has his supporters!
The question and answer period looked like it was originally supposed to be simply questions from a group of people pre-selected and arranged on stage behind Dean. However, after a couple of those, someone from the audience stood up and hollered out a question possibly intended to derail Dean, asking how he intended to reduce the number of abortions in America today. If this was intended to fluster him, though, it failed miserably — he immediately said that the first thing we needed to do was ensure health care for all children under the age of eighteen, and the second thing we need to do was to promote sexual education in schools that didn’t limit itself to preaching abstinence, at which point the entire crowd erupted with cheers. Once those died down, Dean said that the third part would be to tell all those white boys in Washington to stay out of our bedrooms and pay attention to things that really matter, and everyone started cheering all over again.
Dean took a few more questions from the audience, and a couple more from the people on stage with him, and then it was time to wrap things up. He returned to the more “motivational”/rousing the troops/stump speech pattern for a few minutes, then called things to an end, clasping hands with McDermott and the people around him onstage, then making is way off, signing autographs on the way.
All in all, it was an excellent afternoon. I’m still quite solidly behind Dean as my candidate of choice, and it was good to be able to see him in person again (especially in a still-crowded but more intimate setting than Westlake Plaza).
Next step: next week’s caucuses!
Update: Dean’s blog says that there were over 2,500 people at today’s event.
Update: I’ve uploaded a quick photo gallery of the event.
iTunes: “My Baby’s In Love With Eddie Vedder” by Yankovic, “Weird Al” from the album Running With Scissors (1999, 3:26).
I just had a conversation with the property manager for my building. We’ve been talking back and forth off and on for a couple weeks now, looking at various options as far as possibly switching apartments, signing a new lease, and getting a month’s rent free as a signing bonus for re-signing my lease.
As it turns out, last week our building was apparently purchased by a new leasing agency, so we weren’t sure what sort of deals or possibilities might exist with the new management. We finally got confirmation on the new setup, and I’m not going to be able to get a free months rent for renewing my lease.
But.
They are going to drop my rent if I renew my lease — from \$650/month to \$495/month!
That.
So.
Rocks.
iTunes: “Insane in the Brain (Da Funky Chunky)” by Cypress Hill from the album Insane in the Brain (1999, 6:37).
…in the world:
United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany (twice), Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece
I was going to do a map of the states I’ve been to (that I can remember) also, but that portion of the World66 site seems to be down at the moment.
Update: The site’s back up. Here’s where I’ve been in the USA…
Alaska, California, Washington D.C., Florida, Indiana, Montana, Oklahoma (I don’t remember it, but I know about it from family stories), Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee (well, not yet, but I’ll be there in a couple weeks for my brother’s wedding), Washington
(map via My World66)
iTunes: “Calling Dr. Luv” by Electric Hellfire Club, The from the album Darkest Hour, The (1997, 4:14).
My first indication that something was going on was hearing the sound of emergency vehicles from the street outside my window. Not an entirely unusual thing, but normally they’ll pass on by — hearing the blast of sirens combined with the compression of air brakes got my attention. Going to my window, I looked down the four stories to the street and saw fire trucks all over the place — one heading down the street to the west of our building (the Park Seneca apartment), another diagonally across the intersection of 8th and Seneca, a Fire Department blazer parked on the lawn of Town Hall, and I could see reflections from another set of emergency lights in the window of the building across the street.
As I looked up across the street at the people looking out their windows, I realized that one window had three women in it, waving to get my attention and pointing towards the far end of my building. Leaning out to look that direction, I saw smoke pouring around the corner of the building — not a good sign. Waving my thanks, I tossed on a pair of pants and went out into the hallway — but nothing seemed to be terribly amiss. No smoke, and none of the doors seemed warm as I pressed my hand against them working my way down the hall.
Starting to wonder if it was the Jensonia Hotel next door, I tried to slide the window at the end of the hallway up, only to have it fall off in my hands. A little startling, and I almost lost my balance, but once I set it down and looked out the window, I saw the source of the smoke. An old chimney on the Jensonia was belching out wave after wave of thick, black smoke. Obviously something had caught fire next door — not a happy thought, but happier than if it had been my building. I wedged the window back into place, came back into my apartment and sat back down.
Then the fire alarm in our building went off.
My lord those things are loud.
Quickly I pulled on socks, shoes, and a sweater, tossed my coat on, and headed back out into the hall, just in time to be passed by three of the firemen. “Where’s the fire?” they asked.
“Next door.”
“What?”
“Here — there’s smoke pouring out of the chimney next door.” I and another tenant who’d come out of his apartment showed the firemen to the window, pulling it back out of the casement again so they could see the source of the smoke. They radioed down to the rest of their crew, some of whom were already investigating the building next door, and I headed downstairs to the street.
Heading down the stairs, I had to laugh a bit. Seeing the ladder from a fire truck extended to the roof of your building outside your hallway window just isn’t an everyday sight (thank goodness)!
Out on the street, I joined a small crowd of other tenants who’d also evacuated. Most of them didn’t know what was going on, so I filled them in on what little I knew while we waited. After a few minutes, the firemen were sufficiently convinced that our building was safe after all to give us all permission to head back in. Unfortunately, the fire alarm was still merrily wailing away — the switch to turn it off is behind a locked door, and our on-site property manager has a second job and wasn’t at the building, and nobody had her emergency contact number on them. We all stood around watching the firemen assigned to our building pack up and maneuver their equipment out of the street (ever seen a fire truck parallel park before?) while they decided what to do next.
Eventually, the simplest solution seemed the best, and a few of the firemen went down to the basement to force open the door to the sprinkler system. A few moments later, the alarm stopped, and we all started filtering back in.
Before going back in, another tenant and I asked the firemen just what had gone on. It turns out that there was a small (but very smoky) boiler fire next door that sent smoke right up the old chimney. Because of the rain and slight breeze, though, it sent the smoke nearly sideways over our building, so that as they were driving up the street towards us it looked like there was a huge blaze coming up right from our roof. They figure it was probably when they hooked their hose to our building’s standpipe and started pumping water into it that our alarm got triggered.
So. That was my morning. How was yours?
From Business 2.0‘s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business for 2003:
36: Think they’ll buy the April Fool’s joke thing again? Nah, better go with the bit about the top-secret location.
Michael Hanscom, a temp worker at Microsoft’s in-house print shop, is fired after posting to his blog a photo that showed workers at the facility taking delivery of several Apple G5 computers. His supervisor insists that Hanscom was fired not for showing the company relying on the product of its chief rival, but for revealing the location of one of its shipping and receiving departments.
(via BoingBoing)
Update: CNN has summarized this article (along with the my mention). Thanks to Jon for pointing it out!
For years, as I was growing up, I’d watch various sci-fi near-future films like Freejack, Strange Days, or any number of others where at some point in the movie, for one reason or another (quite likely more for a good soundtrack and/or good eye candy than for any reason really related to the plot) the main character would have to go into a dance club. The club would invariably be dimly lit, hazy, reverberating with pounding electronic beats, and packed wall-to-wall with beautiful people in incredible outfits that were usually some variation of leather or vinyl, often titillating or outright revealing.
I’d always see these scenes and replay them over and over in my head or on tape when they were released for rent, drinking up every detail. These were the clubs I wanted to go to. I wanted to be one of those people, walking through the crowds, relishing the mix of dark sensuality and sexuality that the scenes presented. Where in the movies, these scenes were usually played to put the main character (and, by extension, the audience) out of their element and at some level ill at ease, all I wanted to do was step through the screen and join in the party.
Anchorage being Anchorage, of course, for me it was nothing more than a fantasy. I did my best to find the music, and didn’t to too terribly shabbily — in junior high, when nearly everyone I knew was listening to Whitney Houston, DeBarge, and Bon Jovi on the pop stations, I was digging through the racks of tapes in the store to find Men Without Hats, Shriekback, and Depeche Mode. The only songs on the radio at that period that ever really caught my ear are those that now often get lumped into the “New Wave” category — Pet Shop Boys, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, and so on. Soft Cell hit big with ‘Tainted Love‘, and I discovered that the rest of that album, Non Stop Erotic Cabaret, was far more interesting than that simple pop song, with gems such as ‘Seedy Films’ and ‘Sex Dwarf‘ finding their way into my world.
I just want to quickly say how insanely impressed I am with how many of the artists I’ve mentioned in this post are available on the iTunes Music Store. Sometimes it’s just an album or a few songs, but almost every one of these links is a working iTMS link, and even though many of these artists are the more “popular” artists of the alternative scene, I’m still quite surprised that I found as many as I did. Kudos to Apple and the music companies both. As the years went on, I continued to focus only lightly on pop, finding myself drawn more and more into the worlds of ‘alternative’ and industrial music. Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Ministry, The Cure, Primus, The Violent Femmes, Nitzer Ebb, Sisters of Mercy, Peter Murphy, Love and Rockets, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult — here was the music that meant something to me. Not the processed pablum that the top-40 radio stations tried desperately to convince us that we had to buy, but the darker, twisted, charged, sometimes violent but often tongue-in-cheek wierdness that would never be popular. I loved it all.
So I’d found the music. To give Anchorage its credit, we tried the clubs. The first I ever found was Sharkey’s, a split-level non-alcoholic teen club with top-40 and hip-hop upstairs and alternative and industrial down in the basement. It was the perfect introduction to that world for me. Suddenly, I discovered that even in Anchorage, there were more people like me, and every weekend, this unfinished basement of a building in downtown Anchorage would fill with all the rest of Anchorage’s burgeoning alternative population. There was a big concrete support pillar right in the middle of the dance floor, and while most of the time it just stood there, any time a good ‘mosh’ song started pounding out of the speakers — Ministry‘s ‘Jesus Built my Hotrod‘, for example — suddenly there’d be a mass of people circling around and around the floor, with the pole at the center of the circle, all of us building up momentum until someone got crazy enough to turn around and suddenly start pushing through the opposite direction. Sure, there were occasional bruises when bodies collided, but never any violence, and it was all in fun — we knew exactly what we were in for, and if someone ever tripped and fell or got knocked down, immediately there were arms and hands all around hauling them back up and tossing them right back in the press.
Eventually, Sharkey’s closed, and Anchorage worked its way through club after club. I was fortunate enough to be the DJ at quite a few of them in the 1990’s, and some of my fondest memories from my time in Anchorage are from those days. Standing in the DJ booth, looking out over a sea of bodies dancing and having fun, watching people try to leave the dance floor only to have them run right back on when the next song came on, laughing as they cursed me with a grin on their face because I wouldn’t let them rest. Feeling the energy of the club at its peak — watching the bodies move, knowing that they were there, dancing and having fun because I was giving them what they wanted, getting the charge off of the atmosphere. It’s almost indescribable, but I would leave the club every night incredibly amped, feeling like I’d taken all the energy generated over the course of the night and pulled it all into me, channelling it from the dance floor, though me, back into the music and back into the people on the floor.
Of course, all good things must come to an end, and as times and trends changed, what was left of the alternative scene in Anchorage finally gave up the ghost. Some people had grown and gone on to other things, others had left the state seeking bigger and better things, others had just disappeared into their own lives. Not long after that, I decided it was time to follow my own paths outside of Alaska, and I packed my bags and left, moving down to Seattle.
And here, finally, in a sense, we come full circle. In Seattle, I’ve found the things that had originally started me down these long and winding roads. Not only do I still have all the music that has found its way into my collection over the years, but after a long work week when the weekend rolls around, I can head out and immerse myself in crowds like those in the movies that had caught my eye for so many years. Going to the Vogue on the weekends is very much like I’d imagined these clubs could be all so long ago — the music, the people, and oh, yes, the outfits! The club isn’t as expansive or as lavish as those in the movies (this is the real world, after all, and not a big-budget film), but it has all the right elements, with the definite added bonus of being real, and not just a short sequence on film in a dark theater.
Sunday nights are ‘fetish night‘ at the Vogue. Most Sundays, as I’ve mentioned before, this just means that things are a bit less ‘tourist’ friendly, and you’re more likely to see the more extreme outfits on display (and sometimes, there’s not much to display at all). Occasionally, though, there will be special events going on, like tonight’s presentations by Blue Dungeon. Three times during the night, the floor and stages were cleared, and Mistress Blue and her troupe took over with demonstrations. While I’m not a fetishist myself, the performances are a lot of fun to watch, and everyone involved obviously enjoys what they do (and have done). Once the shows were done, the music came back up, and the floor was once again filled with people out having fun, dancing, flirting, and enjoying themselves.
Tonight, as I left the dance floor and stood against the wall, I had to smile. Years ago, things like this were nothing more than a fantasy, something I’d seen and knew that I wanted to be a part of, but didn’t have the opportunities to take advantage of. Now, though, it’s a fantasy no longer, but a world that I’m part of. A small part, perhaps — while I can go out onto an empty dance floor and dance until I exhaust myself, I’m all too often painfully shy when it comes to actually talking to anyone, and so have met only a few people over the past two years of putting an appearance most weekends — but a part none the less.
And try as I might, when all’s said and done, that’s cooler than I can really put into words.
iTunes: “Cuz It’s Hot (12″)\” by My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult from the album Black Box (1990, 10:17).
This is really early (my birthday isn’t until May 3rd), but I’m starting to put together a birthday wishlist. Admittedly, just about everything I’ve come up with so far is definitely on the “wish” side (as in, triple-digit prices), but I can dream, right? ;)
That’s it for the moment. As I’ve said, they’re all kind of high-ticket items, but that’s the point of a wish list. There’s a few months to save up before the big day rolls around, anyway. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. :)
iTunes: “Decypher” by Velvet Acid Christ from the album Fun With Knives (1999, 4:47).
Either we just had a small earthquake, or they’re making NyQuil a lot stronger than they used to.
iTunes: “More” by Crystal Method, The from the album Keep Hope Alive (1996, 5:59).