check check is the robot on? do the robot. binary solo!
argh
Which cat is it that is not properly using the litter box? How can I isolate for and test this? Lock one at a time in the basement, maybe?
Yelling
I awakened this morning from a dream in which while at a darkened coin-operated video-game arcade, I took a series of calls from competing IT salespeople which culminated in IT salesperson A yelling at me for even considering speaking to IT salesperson B. I told him to get fucked, as one might well imagine. Still, what an odd dream.
It’s not that I haven’t actually had the experience of managing competing IT sales contacts. It’s that I never found that experience especially striking or difficult, so it really surprises me that the motif would surface in a dream.
I was amused that the entire thing was set in a murky arcade. The arcade itself appeared to be set in a facility such as an airport, although devoid of people.
striped madras
in my childhood home and bedroom, the curtains and bedspread of my room were cool shades of blues and greens, and the occasional sweep of midnight headlamps across the wa’l is in memory blue as well.
my sister’s room and my parents’ room also had color-matched drapes and bedspreads, Suzy’s being pinks and mauves to my folks’ golden and yellow.
I somehow ended up with my sister’s bedspread and just washed it today. It, and those other, similar, lost pieces of cloth that accompanied it into our home well over forty years ago, are awfully cool and restrained. Modern. Made to last.
The blue sweep of those eleven o’clock headlights over the wall and ceiling of my room won’t outlast the chemical activity in my brain, of course. I’m not sure what it meant to me at the time, that I should keep it so clearly in mind. I do know that I had frequent and varied nightmares in that room and many others. I would guess that I found that luminous precession menacing and portentous.
There’s a late night state of mind I rarely find accessible anymore which I associate with observing those lights. I suppose I’m glancingly close to it as I write this, tonight.
Good and bad
Finally, we have higher-speed internet access: 2.x mbps as opposed to the former 256k dsl. Swapping out the access points and routers went very smoothly, thank heavens. The biggest stumbling block was dealing with the behavior of a mixed pack of Airport Express wireless networking devices. Thankfully they have settled down and give every sign of continued maintenance-free networking activity.
In practical terms, this means that Hulu is now functional.
I had a line on a near-mint large-aperture goto telescope, but in order to retrieve it I had to go to the Kitsap peninsula. After the windstorm overnight, the day was clear, warm, and bright, and I was looking forward to a ferry ride and a drive in the company of the pup. Alas, as I waited to drive onto the ferry, my car’s battery died. For the past couple of weeks, the car has had flaky electronics, and this was the last straw. On my way to the ferry, I had driven about twenty miles – the battery had received more than enough juice. It was apparent to me that if I got a jump and crossed to the peninsula, the probability of another non-starter event was very high, and so I waved off.
Tomorrow I take the car in to learn the expense entailed. That expense may very well curdle the telescope purchase.
Wild
Months later, Viv and I finally got around to seeing the film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are.” It certainly reduced the expedition of six or seven six or seven year old girls seated a row ahead of us to sodden, weeping mourners at the grave of childhood. This seems possibly to not be a desirable outcome for a children’s film, but I can make no special claim to information concerning aesthetic or market-segment objectives for the film.
On the whole, I was impressed with the film and enjoyed it very much. The monster visualizations are remarkable and the fidelity of their realization to the source material contributed mightily to the dreamlike feeling that pervaded the experience of viewing the work.
The particular element in the adaptation which struck me as brilliant, sensible, and possibly at odds with the original is the clear introduction of neoclassical themes into the work. It seems likely that the story as originally conceived by Mr. Sendak incorporated classical allusions, intended or not, and that he deliberately stripped them away as he refined the material, the better to serve the presumably not-yet-classically-knowledgeable audience for the book. Toddlers and first graders are unlikely to have a clear concept of the Minotaur or Elysium, but liberal-arts majors may reasonably be expected to understand the referents by the time they view the film.
Multimedia message
hm
some sort of DNS hijack against google.com from where I sit:
traceroute to google.com (72.14.213.104), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 6.089 ms 3.110 ms 5.589 ms
2 tukw-dsl-gw37-229.tukw.qwest.net (63.231.10.229) 47.183 ms 51.615 ms 47.813 ms
3 tukw-agw1.inet.qwest.net (71.217.185.33) 48.173 ms 48.646 ms 49.828 ms
4 sea-core-02.inet.qwest.net (67.14.1.198) 48.039 ms 48.777 ms 48.022 ms
5 sea-brdr-01.inet.qwest.net (205.171.26.58) 47.646 ms 58.614 ms 47.977 ms
6 192.205.36.49 (192.205.36.49) 47.369 ms 47.391 ms 47.977 ms
7 cr2.st6wa.ip.att.net (12.122.146.178) 51.957 ms 53.188 ms 53.086 ms
8 12.122.146.153 (12.122.146.153) 50.929 ms 48.684 ms 49.392 ms
9 12.89.209.14 (12.89.209.14) 48.145 ms 49.212 ms 47.831 ms
10 209.85.249.34 (209.85.249.34) 48.570 ms
209.85.249.32 (209.85.249.32) 48.021 ms 47.793 ms
11 216.239.46.204 (216.239.46.204) 55.331 ms 54.017 ms 56.133 ms
12 64.233.174.103 (64.233.174.103) 57.848 ms 54.960 ms
64.233.174.101 (64.233.174.101) 56.395 ms
13 209.85.253.10 (209.85.253.10) 58.150 ms 54.912 ms
209.85.253.2 (209.85.253.2) 56.284 ms
14 pv-in-f104.1e100.net (72.14.213.104) 54.756 ms 56.287 ms 58.135 ms
no effect on certain other google subdomains, eg mail.google.com or maps.google.com.
Karel
Last night I had an elaborate dream about my deceased friend Karel – somehow he and I had managed to obtain some sort of subsidized space in a large, castle-like building. His family was there, or at any rate my dream version of it. The majority of the tenants were from Eastern Europe and my job was to coordinate space allocation. I’m pretty sure the building was based on my experience of musicians’ practice spaces, warrens of subdivided rooms in unused industrial buildings and basements.
This building was like an armory or something and had a large greensward which was unfortunately pretty nasty – image a lawn that has been turned into an unkempt swamp and you will get the idea. The marshy area was strewn with black, abandoned shipping crates and amplifier cases, the detritus that accumulates in practice-hall corridors.
The dream was sufficiently convincing that I just took Karel’s presence at face value, only recognizing it as a gift of overtime minutes in the moments after awakening.
There was a large dog, not friendly, possibly an irish wolfhound, probably drawn from watching the Thin Man marathon on TMC over New Year’s.
The heart of the dream, however, was the necessity of billeting a large group of ethnic Russians in the building. The Eastern Europeans already settled in their spaces were dead set against welcoming Russians into the building, but they didn’t have any say in the matter as the building was some sort of transitional shelter for recent arrivals to the locale. People became angry at me because I pointed out that the Russians could not be excluded on the basis of nationality.
Karel tried to mediate, unsuccessfully, and it was about this time that I began to gain an awareness that this was some sort of dream.
It was nice to see and spend time with him again. I miss him. He was a nebbish and a sad sack, but he had a kind heart.