Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: asides
The wonderful internet
What I haven’t been talking about is a project, a bit of research I’ve been doing for the last six months or so in lieu of actual, you know, writing. Haven’t mentioned it for fear of jinxing it. Still won’t mention it (beyond this slight mention) for fear of jinxing it. Anyway, in the spirit of research, I found the blog The Price of Silver written by Florida photographer Alan Kaplan. Specifically, I went hunting for information on a Native American dish, sofkee. Alan Kaplan writes: “Think making coffee by putting the coffee into a pan of boiling water, then pouring that into a cup without straining the grounds out of it first. You just use the corn instead of coffee. The corn is softer, less gritty than coffee grounds, but you drink both the liquid on top as well as the soggy corn meal. Different perhaps, but not really all that bad.”
His is a quiet voice . . . regular posts about his meals, his difficulty gaining weight, his adventures with his companion Monkette (a stuffed animal), his photography. He features in many of his photos, and I have the impression of a gaunt, curly-haired fellow, a Kurt Vonnegut type if Vonnegut hadn’t gone gray. He wrote regularly and despite having few to no comments to his posts. Not an attention slave like moi.
Yeah, “wrote”. I fast forwarded to see his recent stuff, and my fast forwarding ground to a halt in the early part of 2010. Alan Kaplan died in late December 2009, complications during recovery from a heart attack. On the notice of his passing (written by his son and daughter), there are 64 comments. So, no, he was not writing in a vacuum.
The Price of Silver carries the following message below the title:
“The price of one admission is your life.” The same with silver. You get hooked. You get close. You want more. More is not enough.
. . . which reads like poetry, I think.
D.
Something like one out of five of my Facebook friends are people I don’t know. I don’t know them, I don’t know how they found their way onto my friends list. I suppose I must have accepted their invitation and in a burst of e-licentiousness I friended them back. I don’t care what they’re doing and I don’t read their posts. They’re like background noise at a party.
Then there are my “friends” from my old high school, the one I attended in ninth grade. Some of these folks I really do care about. Some I frankly dislike. Some I like, but I hate their politics, and I have to restrain myself from picking fights with them or with their commenters. Sometimes I don’t restrain myself.
They’re teabaggers, some of them. On one level I feel squicked out, knowing I palled with people who would later become wingnuts. And on another level, I feel like I failed them. On the other hand, one of my best friends from junior high — a guy with whom I had frequent political arguments — is a self-described conservative. And if I couldn’t convince him of my politics, I guess I’m just not that good at convincing.
It’s not like anyone listens to me. I’ll update my status and one or two people will “like” and one or two, if I’m lucky, will comment. Admittedly, I don’t update that often, but it’s a vicious circle. One of my wingnuttier acquaintances from 9th grade makes some comment about the morons at the DMV, or fixing up a room of his house, and ten, twenty people comment. Mostly women. Is it because he is recently divorced and they are too? I would think the soul patch on his profile photo would put them off, but apparently some women are into soul patches.
Once, in med school, people listened to me. It was uncanny. We were gathering outside a lecture hall maybe ten minutes before class would start, and I was exclaiming about some damn bit of politics or another, and before I knew what was happening I had a knot of about ten people around me. Listening to me. I realized that I had no idea what I had just said, never mind any understanding of why it should attract so much attention, and in the shock of the moment I lost my train of thought. I shut the hell up and they dispersed and I was relieved. And it never happened again.
But back to Facebook. I admit that I friended some people just to look at their pix and see what they look like nowadays. Mind you, I haven’t aged all that well, since I’m short and tubby (no matter how many hours I log in the gym) and balding and short and going gray and still short. But some of these people — wow. What happened to you. While others are still every bit as cute as they were thirty-five years ago. Life’s unfair that way.
The best moment of my Facebook experience is when I figured out how to block game requests. I have one game on Facebook, Word Twist, and I don’t care about the other games. I don’t give a damn if Sue needs leaf mulch for her beets, or if Mike wants to give me two dozen rounds of ammo for my Glock, free of charge. This is just so much spam to me, only even less useful, since I’m told that some people actually eat spam. Once I figured out how to block that crap, my Facebook page became much prettier.
The most striking thing about Facebook is that no one ever wants to talk to me. Right this instant, seven of my friends are on Facebook. Yes, I realize most simply have their computer on, and they’re busy feeding their chickens or boffing their spouses or doing the laundry, and their computer is sitting forlorn and forgotten, but some of them are people who like me, or at least I believe they do, and they’re not saying hi. Which is only one small step away from the annoying observation: Neither am I. Which makes me wonder: can I block that function, too?
Oh, hey, one of my new friends is online right now! I’m outa here.
D.
They keep getting . . . older?
Our first inkling that this was a different sort of Halloween came when Jake answered the door for our first trick-or-treaters, and we could hear a very bass TRICK OR TREAT shaking the windows. Okay, that’s hyperbole, but the point remains we had an older crowd tonight. And I’m not talking high school students.
We live near Cal State Bakersfield. At least half of our trick-or-treaters were college students. And while I have no objection to feeding starving students (nor do I mind the sight of voluptuous trick-or-treaters), still, I was speechless when one young woman asked if I had anything microwaveable. Because, you know, we live in the dorms.
My first thought was, What, you want a Lean Cuisine? But I merely stammered something like No, all we have is junk food.
Only later did I think that I might have pointed out: Really no reason why you can’t microwave those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
D.
National treasure
Here’s a video clip of Stephen Colbert on The View. I think this is the first time ever that I regret not recording that show.
Sorry, I don’t seem to have much to say lately. On the upside, I’m making progress gestating a new novel. The world-building aspects are going well, but when it comes down to plot details, all I’m getting is trite shit. Oh, well. Build the world and the rest will follow, I hope.
Oh and this was fun: ever how the slang word “bugger” originated?
D.
My brain hurts
Lots of folks in a tizzy over that UFO sighting in New York City.
Oy.
I like that extra special detail, you know, the “NORAD General” who predicted a UFO invasion on 10/13/10. ‘Kay, I’m still waiting . . .
D.
Funny how it all comes back to you
I guess the stereotypical situation is, Junior brings his Algebra homework home from school, and his parents groan about how much they hated their Algebra class, then die a little inside as they struggle to help him with his homework. But that’s not THIS family. Karen more or less minored in Mathematics at Berkeley, and I was no slouch myself (though nowhere near as proficient as she was).
Still, neither one of us has done much Calculus in the last thirty years, and hey, you forget stuff. You forget the chain rule and the product rule. I even forgot some simple things about taking derivatives. But you know what? It doesn’t take long to recover all those old skills.
I can even recapture some of the joy I derived from Calculus homework . . . the way each problem was a little puzzle, and how great it was to get the right answer in the most efficient manner possible. There’s a saying in science that a lazy scientist is a good scientist, and the same is true for math. If you’re working too hard at something, chances are you’re doing it wrong. Long division excepted: that’s always a bitch.
Is it like that in all disciplines, I wonder? Certainly must be true for programming. And writing, I suspect, since some of the best crafted novels seem so simple at their core. Although messy novels have their place, too.
I can’t wait until Jake gets to Integral Calculus. Now that’s entertainment.
D.
Jury duty
There must have been at least two hundred of us in the room. We were instructed to report to the courthouse at 8:15 AM, but they didn’t even get to the opening spiel until 9:30. The bailiff who gave the spiel fancied himself a stand-up, and really, he wasn’t half bad. But what are you going to do with 200+ people who aren’t really happy to be there?
At 10:00, he read off the randomly selected names in alphabetical order. Now, I think he should have read them in random order, just to heighten the torture. But the way he did it, those of us with 3rd grade or better education knew precisely when we were off the hook. The rest remained anxious to the end.
Interesting how some folks took it in stride while others cursed. Mostly I just waited, anxiously, until the bailiff had passed by us HOs. (And you know how much a HO likes being in a courthouse. Just sayin’.) Roughly forty of the two hundred of us marched off to face voir dire, while the rest were instructed to sit. And sit. And watch the news, or Rachael Rae, or (after lunch) Criminal Intent, or Family Feud.
I had a book. I brought Markos Moulitsas’s American Taliban, which is good, but I can’t get as absorbed in nonfiction as I do in fiction. So during our two-hour lunch break I drove home to pick up my eBook reader. I finished the second Hunger Games book today, and I must say, Collins managed to surprise me a few times. And it wasn’t as big a letdown as middle books in a trilogy generally are. And she only had one minor plot fuck-up toward the end. All in all, good work.
The funny bailiff read off another list of names at 2:30 PM, this one somewhat shorter, maybe 30 names. And he was back again at 3:20. We all cursed. We were so close — we knew we would be discharged, free as birds, at 4:00! But he only came back to tell us we were discharged a little earlier than planned. Free to go for another year.
So all in all not as much fun as I had the LAST time I was stuck in the juror pool. Followup to that old post: I found out that I was tossed because of my views on child endangerment. My patient, who was a friend of this judge, told me that by stating my views so forcefully, I had come close to disqualifying the entire juror pool!
That’ll teach ’em to bother a doctor.
Anyway, thank heavens they didn’t pick me today. Now I can go back to work and do what I do best: eat pork rinds for lunch while I speed-surf the ‘net.
D.
Not a bad birthday thus far
We went to a teppanyaki-sushi place. The chef made a cute little volcano out of an onion — leaving the rings intact, stacking them to make the cone, then dumping a little booze down the middle as fuel for the flames. Nice. And the food was good, too.
Forty-nine. A perfect square. I’ll have to make it to 64 to hit the next perfect square. And then I’ll be 1000000 in binary.
But for now, I’ll have to be content with 110001.
D.