Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: July 2008
Quickie shout-out
Good thing I wrote that Q-tip post early yesterday. If I hadn’t, you would have had nothing but “Sorry, nothing tonight” to read. Yeah, it was that bad. I was in the ER from 6:30 to 11, and then, when I got home, I had to figure out how to turn a digital photo into a passport-sized photo. If I had been wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, I’m sure I could have done that in ten or fifteen minutes. After 15 hours of almost continuous work*, the best I could manage was a couple of grainy head shots of this grim dude:
Did you know you can’t smile for a passport photo? No, really! It’s a 9/11 thing. From wiseGEEK:
The reason smiling in passport photos has been strongly discouraged or banned has to do with international security measures. Many modernized airports now use advanced biometric scanning devices which contain facial recognition software. Ideally, a targeted passenger’s face can be scanned electronically and compared against a database of legally obtained passport photos. Distinctive biometric patterns, such as the distance between one’s eyes or the shape of one’s mouth, can rarely be sufficiently altered to prevent a match.
The passport photographs used for comparison should ideally be consistent and accurate, with no shadows or reflections to distort the facial measurements. Passport applicants must also sweep any hair away from their faces, place their eyeglasses on the tip of their nose, and face completely forward with a neutral expression. Smiling in passport photos can distort the subject’s eyes and change the relationship between biometric points.
Anyway, since I’m not feeling much like an entertainer tonight, I’m going to turn y’all on to a blog my son found. Thanks, Jake, for finding The Internet is an In-Joke. Check ’em out, enjoy, and wish me a good night’s sleep.
D.
And another shout-out!
Telltale Games (of Sam and Max fame) will be releasing a Wallace and Gromit game, Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventure. Watch the trailer!
*Work at the office and hospital, NOT fifteen hours of work on this photo.
It’s evil.
Some of you have asked about this.
To which I reply,
Well, not entirely evil. There are good ways to use Q-tips and bad ways to use Q-tips. Follow me below the fold for your daily dose of infotainment!
Alt gaming
If you think gaming is nothing but shooters, sims, and fantasy RPGs, you’ve had your head in the sand. Turns out there’s a wealth of little games (most of them free) that defy categorization. Take Gravity Head, for example. Your head has a powerful gravitational field which you can reverse at will. You use this power to spray seeds with water, thus growing flowers; that’s the easy part. The tough part is delivering those flowers to your girl.
Some of these games are pointless. In the all black-and-white “game” The Graveyard, you guide an old lady through a graveyard. Take her to the bench, let her sit down, then guide her out again. That’s the whole thing. Oh — for $5.00, they’ll unlock the full game for you. In that version, the old lady has a chance of dying in the graveyard every time you play.
Remember Kafkamesto? I wrote about it ages ago, so perhaps this one’s new to you. If you like Franz Kafka and if you’re familiar with his work, you’ll dig this game. Just be sure you check your desire to win at the door.
And then there’s Rod Humble’s The Marriage. I’ve played it, I’ve read his explanation, and I’m still scratching my head. This is what happens when artists learn to program, I guess (or when programmers fancy themselves artists?)
Ah, well. Sometimes it’s fun to play a head-scratcher, sometimes it’s better to play a game with hobos and fruit-f*ckers. Should I feel guilty that I’m assaulting street people with a rake? I would so not do well with Grand Theft Auto III.
D.
Hey, neighbor!
Did I tell you Tom Hanks bought a beach-front home about a mile or two up the road? That shocked me at first, but then I figured it out. He can probably charter a private plane, or perhaps he has friends who fly. They’ll fly into Brookings’ little airport bringing all of their goodies with them. Food, friends, booze, maybe even a chef. He comes in for the weekend, parties it up, takes long walks on the beach, soaks up the great scenery, then goes home to where there’s stuff to do. That’s my theory. I can’t imagine he’ll actually want to blend in with us plebes. And while it might be fun to clean his earwax, I’d have a hard time not saying, “You know, I haven’t liked anything you’ve done since Big. Or was it Splash? Or Turner and Hooch? One of those. Why can’t you make movies like those, why does everything have to be MEANINGFUL these days? Get over yourself. You’re not entertaining anymore. It’s like the way Steve Martin sucks so much lately. Last good movie he did was The Man With Two Brains. Or maybe Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid — whichever was the last one. He used to be good. Now he fancies himself a Serious Actor. Just like you do, Tom. May I call you Tom? And I’d like to add, Forrest Gump sucked. I never saw it, but every clip I ever saw from it made my brain hurt. It pains me just knowing that movie exists. Do you use Q-tips? You shouldn’t, you know. By the way, I have this screenplay. Well, not really; it’s more of a short story. But it would lend itself nicely to a screenplay. Several short stories, actually, but I really see you as the dad in this one. Or maybe the granddad. You’ve kind of let yourself go.”
No, he really doesn’t want to get to know the locals. Trust me on this.
Stick around. I should be live by 8:15 PM my time.
D.
Failing and excellence
I’ve been trying to tweak Jake’s writing so that he can wow a high school English teacher. (Listening, Sis?) Maybe I’m maligning secondary education, but based on what I experienced at Berkeley, the bar isn’t merely set low for “writing excellence,” the bar is hidden by weeds.
Here is my contention: to get an A on a high school paper, the student need only (A) have a clear thesis statement in the first paragraph, (B) have clear topic sentences for each supporting paragraph, (C) support his thesis in a factual way in the body of the essay, (D) restate the thesis at the end, and (E) avoid egregious spelling and grammatical errors.
I suggested to Jake (and, for my troubles, he accused me of sounding like this summer’s latest Feel Good Inspirational Movie) that this isn’t good enough. If he is capable of excellence, he should strive for excellence.
What’s lacking in the “A paper” I’ve outlined above? The deficit lies in (D), the restatement of the thesis. I told Jake that most A students only manage to reword their thesis statement and bring nothing new to that last paragraph. Thus*,
Paragraph 1: In this paper, I will demonstrate my love for fried food.
Paragraph 2: I love all the common fried foods. I love French fries, onion rings, and Tater tots.
Paragraph 3: I also love fried meats. Sweet and sour pork? Bring it on! Fried shrimp? Can you say, “All you can eat”?
Paragraph 4: I even love uncommon fried foods such as fried smelt, fried zucchini, and battered-and-deep-fried Snickers Bars.
Paragraph 5: In conclusion, if it drips grease and clogs your arteries, I’ll eat it up like a bag of Lays Potato Chips.
See what I mean? The summary statement tells us nothing we haven’t already learned with the thesis statement in Paragraph 1.
I would argue that the best essayists give the reader an idea where the essay is going in Paragraph 1, edify the reader in the paragraphs that follow, and conclude with a summary which, while echoing the initial thesis statement, brings much more to the reader than the reader had at the outset. That’s what great essayists like Lewis Lapham, Kurt Vonnegut, or Andrei Codrescu manage to do (and they make it look easy, too). And that’s the goal to which my son should aspire.
Pull that bar up out of the weeds. Put it in the clouds. Set the kid up for failure, yeah! Better to fail at a lofty goal than succeed at a trivial one. And isn’t that the exact opposite of No Child Left Behind?
The brain is like a muscle. Yes, that’s my expert medical opinion. If you don’t use it, it atrophies; if you exercise it and push it to the limit, it grows stronger. Push it to the “fail” point and, next time around, the “fail” point will be that much higher.
On the other hand, maybe I’ll only succeed in giving the kid a nervous breakdown. Do people still get nervous breakdowns?
D.
* For the literalists, like my son: NO, I do not mean to imply that this “essay” would get an A. I’m trying to make a point, okay?
I almost killed myself today
Every ten years or so, I have to open my mouth and say something so incredibly stupid that my entitlement to a Darwin Award seems inevitable.
At the post office today, I waited behind some pregnant woman with dreadlocks. Nearby, lurking about and talking to himself, stood a man with wild, dark hair, and tattoos galore. He was a fidgety dude, small, wiry, with unblinking eyes.
I stepped up to the counter to buy stamps and send off a couple PaperbackSwap books. Dreadlock gal was to my right. Scary dude had wandered off to another part of the post office, well out of ear shot.
I almost said to the post office clerk, “So. What’s with Charlie Manson?” but I was in a non-snarky mood, I guess, and kept my mouth shut for a change.
On the way out of the post office, who do I see driving off together? That’s right: Charlie Manson and his pregnant gal. The same pregnant gal who was standing three feet away from me when I would have made my lousy joke, the same gal who would have repeated it back to her wild-eyed boyfriend, the boyfriend who would have tracked me down and killed me, my wife, AND my son, thus allowing me to meet all of the requirements for a Darwin Award (no progeny, dontcha know).
There’s a Jewish teaching that you should only speak if you have something necessary to say. One should be deliberate in one’s speech, that’s the idea.
I’m starting to see the wisdom of this.
***
New patient, a guy in his fifties. He’s sitting in my waiting room, filling out paperwork while I work through my afternoon’s patients. One of my patients gives me a big hug. Nice old gal, she’s sorry to see me go, what will we ever do without you, etc. Another old gal comes in, gets her ears cleaned out, insists on a hug. We’re going to miss you, we’re so sorry to see you leave, oh come on give me another hug.
Finally, I called my new patient back into the room.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You won’t have to hug me.”
D.
Sleepless in Seattle Brookings
It doesn’t happen that often, but WordPress just ate my post.
And, as the above title suggests, I’m way too tired to reproduce it. Too bad, really; it would have made you laugh, and cry, and reevaluate your world view, and donate all your worldly goods to the orphaned puppies and kitties of the world, and changed your amalgam fillings to gold caps, and made your breasts grow one cup size, assuming of course that you want your breasts to grow one cup size.
Good night. Let’s see if I can get more than four hours of sleep this time around.
D.
P.S.: Okay, let me put a romantic scenario to you, followed by a few questions. Boy breaks up with girl, discovers his true feelings only after breaking up, comes crawling back. Familiar scenario? Has it happened to you? Did you take him back? Under what circumstances would you take him back — or is he toast forever? Phrased a bit differently: would the trite romantic comedy climax (guy performs some ridiculous feat, like Steve Carell’s bike ride at the end of 40 Year Old Virgin, proving his oh so stubborn love) ever work for you?
Why it’s a good idea to clean the office once per decade
Look what I found! Is this a great photo, or what?
The date on this is December, 2000. Jake is five years old, and we’re at the Newport Aquarium (Newport, Oregon — a terrific aquarium, by the way). Note Wild Things tee-shirt and cute kid.
Sorry it’s crooked. I’m feeling too tired and lazy to futz with cropping.
D.