Posted on by mwhybark

Hurricane watch

Today is my dad’s birthday, and he spent it partly at work and partly at home in North Carolina watching the power flicker and treelimbs fly by the house.

They finally lost power at around 6pm, my mom says, which places that event at about the time thet Isabel’s center was as close to them as it got.

I spent much of my day keeping tabs on the storm via both WUNC, my folks’ public radio station, which I listen to anyway for a while each day and also the TV station they were watching, WRAL.

The other predictable web-haunts I had up all day were The Weather Channel and the Weather Underground.

Despite the old-time internet reputation that the the Weather Underground has, I found The Weather Channel‘s default page design to be my single best source of information The largest graphic all day was a continously updated screenshot of the weather satellite view of the storm’s position, in real time.

That was the information I wanted, and all I had to do was glance at the page.

Amusingly, at the end of the day, I was on the phone to someone in NYC (no, not one of the usual suspects). Her antsy concern to be home before the hurricane took me by surprise, considering the calm conversations I had had with my parents about treelimbs cartwheeling by the house. She described the weather she saw out her window as ‘apocalyptic.’

I can only imagine what the weather looked like in Chapel Hill, at closest approach, about 120 miles from the eye of the storm.

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Gizmos Songbook, IllDonk Fest

The Gizmos Songbook has been made available for the perusal of the one or two of you who care about obscure pre-hardcore American punk bands.

Also, due to unforeseen technical difficulties which will crop up at the last minute, I will NOT be able to appear at the Illuminated Donkey Festival, as scheduled:

“Reformatting the Server Whatsits to Clear the Flibber-Flabber” 9:00 P.M. Brunswick Towers Conference Center. Panelists: Michael Whybark and Paul Frankenstein.

Longtime Illuminated Donkey contributors and associates Michael Whybark and Paul Frankenstein discuss the latest Internet technology and why it always seems to be crashing. Attendees are guaranteed that at least one-third of all words used will be intelligible to the general public.

It was sweet of Ken to book me. I really appreciate the effort and expense involved (whooee – last minute one-way nonrefundable first-class tickets in and out of Newark will run ya, just ask Ken). I’m particularly sorry to be missing Ken’s sure-to-be-a-wowser one man panel, “Thirst, Alcohol, and the Single American Woman,” but, being happily married, realize my personal interest in this was a reflection of both prurience and cruelty and so will sleep very well indeed in its’ lack.

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Predictable

Oh, the puzzlin’ I been doin’ over why I ain’t been feelin’ it of late.

I been a-puzzlin’ ‘cuz I’m a dumbass.

It’s September, as you well know, Mike!

I’ll be right as rain agin in a few days.

My folks are getting ready to ride out the hurricane in North Carolina. They are well inland, but the projected track of the storm takes it quite directly to them. Prior hurricanes since they’ve lived in North Carolina have all come ashore in South Carolina and swung back to the north and east after encountering the Appalachians; thus there’s a real possiblity the storm might be more intense than those that have come before.

Posted on by mwhybark

No Kill I

I think I’m basically behind the curve, but I’ve just spent the last forty-five minutes laughing my ass off about this. I stumbled into this brilliant lunacy by way of the Big Green House, who also snogged it from somewheres or other.

To boldly go: the Sacramento News and Review goes in depth on the Sacto Star Trek band scene.

Excerpt:

Marooned in this hot, humid, backwater town on an insignificant planet, the Klingon Capt. pInluH approaches the cluster of puny humans who are taking in the action. The captain is nearly 7 feet tall, his left arm is amputated at the elbow–lost in what must have been one glorious battle–and his gut hangs pendulously over his belt. He’s an aging warrior, but he’s bad news to be sure. He swaggers up to the earthlings, humans and some Vulcans, steadily swigging from cans of Old Milwaukee.

pInluH queries, “Are you ready to rock?”

The crowd is pensive. The Vulcans just stare at the spiny carapace of his forehead. Some smirk.

“I said,” he bellows, “are you ready to rock?” More smirks.

“I do not believe you are ready to rock,” pInluH says with a huff, and then he strides off.

pInluH is the lead singer for Stovokor, a Portland-based Klingon heavy metal band (see this Portland Mercury article). There is a glorious photo of the warriors on stage in the News and Review article. That article, it should be noted, is a fine piece of writing by one Cosmo Garvin that covers the strangeness without condescension, I thought, and also decodes the bits of Trekanalia ebedded (such as the source of one of the band’s names, for example).

But wait! There’s more!

The grand-daddies of the scene are the long running No Kill I, a band that sounds like it would be great fun to see. They have a cross-town rival band, Warp 11, whose music sounds much less like something I’d be interested in, from the article’s description of it.

Both bands have music available online:

No Kill I and spinoff band No Kill I: TNG

Warp 11: Red Alert.

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Salmon

The QFC is advertising $3.99/lb for wild Alaskan Copper River salmon.

No, that didn’t come out right.

The QFC is advertising $3.99/lb for wild Alaskan Copper River salmon!

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Are you talkin' to me?

In entirely unrelated news (despite the importance to the plot of a Presidential campaign), Taxi Driver appeared on one of our movie channels last night as I was preparing for bed and cast its’ voodoo spell, as ever, leading to a much later bedtime than planned.

The print was pristine – I presume what aired derives from a version prepared for DVD release – and utterly hypnotic. The film is so much better than Mean Streets. One wonders if Scorsese knew what he was creating back then withthis film and Raging Bull. Growing up I recall lumping Taxi Driver in with Serpico, The French Connection, and Dog Day Afternoon under the sobriquet of “headache films” becasue of the common tendency toward presenting a gritty, dystopian world via grainy, low-light or available-light cinematography.

On thing that jarred, however, was the film’s happy ending! I’d completely forgotten that DeNiro’s idiot cabbie actually survives his epic gunbattle. It has to be a mistake. I mean, sure it’s not a big wedding or an inheritance or anything like that, but, really, the “bloody finger to the head” schtick sorta tells you everything you need to know, I gotta say.

Seems like others have worried this bone in the past, inconclusively. The best argument, I suppose, is that Scorsese is saying that the line between a hero and a madman is very fine indeed.

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But is it a flash mob?

Some of you will have heard about the Doonesbury-inspired “flash mob” at the foot of the Space Needle this morning.

To summarize, Trudeau depicted a character in the strip calling for a flash mob via her computer on Monday. Well, by the time Seattle got out of bed on Monday morning, someone in Connecticuit, so it’s said, had used the Dean campaign’s online tools to schedule the event.

I was asked to cover the event for The Comics Journal (via the good offices of one David Lasky), so I was there and talked to a number of folks, including Jake Metcalf of 8bitjoystick.com (I tried to give him the secret blogosphere handshake but he seemed unfamiliar with this site, if open to the possibility he’d dropped by). He took a picture of me, among other things.

Since I’m writing about it for the CJ and will do a bit for Tablet as well, I’ll go light on the detail, but it was a fun way to start the day. The participants did, in fact, hop up and down while chanting “The Doctor is in! The Doctor is in!“

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Resumay update time

Is there anything as annoying as updating one’s resumé?

I don’t think so.

Ah well. An unexpected recruiter call lit a fire under my patootie, acually. I also did a comprehensive update last spring – but the really horrible server outage – the one that took the KGP away from us – also kilt my hard-won puffery.

Naturally, I also have some contract work to keep me busy on Friday.

In other news, a test burn of the Gizmos DVD was entirely successful, chapterpoints and all. I will need to doublecheck the entries to be sure I didn’t inadvertently miss a song or two and to make sure I haven’t brain-farted and mislabeled a tune, but WOO HOO.

(Among the furiously dancing heads of my friends I’ve ID’d is a wild-haired blond woman, swinging her tresses – nay, her mane – with wild abandon. Could it be a certain buttoned-up editor currently a-soujourning in London?)