The streets of downtown Chicago were overcast and cold today. It wasn’t the greatest mood raiser to be had, nevertheless, I always feel better after my lunchtime walk, so I went out anyway. I grabbed a bench in Millenium Park and finally had a chance to dive into The Day Of Revolution
Maybe I’m just too sweet a guy or something. Or maybe I should practice being more obnoxious… I was looking over some lab results and noticed that the sex in the records is incorrect! I’ve been involuntarily transgendered! Hmmm, this might just explain something weird that happened yesterday. It was minor, but I’d better get this cleared up before any further hilarity ensues.
I’m sure there are thousands of blog postings around the internet concerning the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorists attacks. I remember the day as being one of great anger for me. I was angry because I’d just been laid off the Friday before 9/11. And as I watched the first tower collapse on TV, I was almost in a rage because I felt that the the stupid unilateralist policies of the Bush administration had set the stage for these horrific attacks. Five years later, I don’t really think the government’s policies or who the President was would have made any difference at all. The attacks were the result of hatred of the other, the not us. There’s no reasoning with hate, but returning the hatred doesn’t work either. It’s become a cliche, but we really do need to find a way to love our enemies. If war can’t conquer hate, then that only leaves love.
Growing up, I never imagined that someday I’d be teaching my son to sew or my daughter to make a dress. Sharing such traditionally womanly arts is not something that little boys are raised to do here. Nevertheless, I’ve really gotten hooked on sewing so I’m very excited to see the results of my daughter’s efforts. I got into it helping my son make his first Sonic the Hedgehog plushie and later making my first cosplay outfit. My daughter is now working on a long dress similar to the one Robin Senna wears in the anime series Witch Hunter Robin, but with red accents. But she isn’t doing it for cosplay but because she’s into goth, so I fully expect this dress to make an appearance at school in the future.
As my interest in sewing grew, WillowBrow told about A Dress A Day. This is Erin McKean’s cool dress oriented blog which I too am becoming enamored with. I had a chance to meet Erin a while back at a meeting of the Chicago chapter of the American Statistical Society and without gushing too much, she’s the kind of brainy and cute woman that we geeky University of Chicago types have always dreamed of! I’ll never look at the dictionary the same way again! /blush
School has started up again, and as the father of a middleschooler, I am officially old! The first day of school went without incident. I picked my daughter up at school and brought her back to my office where she got a chance to witness my mad skillz. My mad skillz of furious typing, calling people up, and a lot of mumble jumble about undelete utilities and recycling bins! LOL But it’s all cool. My dad did the same for me, so I guess this is a way of paying him back and saying thanks.
Yesterday I got some news that I really did not want to hear. Fortunately, I had already taken some steps in the right direction to solve the problem, nevertheless it was not welcome news. If a hurricane is coming, it’s great to be prepared, but it is still bad news that the hurricane is coming!
I remember when I was growing up being rather excitable. It didn’t take much to set me off, and it got me into a lot of trouble at times. In the end two things saved me, Spock and Jesus. An odd combination I’m sure, but for me it was essential. Christianity gave me a spiritual base, but it was Spock that gave me a practical model of self control that resonated with my inner core and still does. I don’t deny my emotions, but I have found that being able to act based on logic, sometimes in spite of how I feel, to be a useful skill. Being cool and logical can be fun too.
Some things just take a long time to recognize, carrying a man purse is just one of them. Few men go out looking to buy a man purse. Like me, they probably had a problem they were trying to solve. I had been carrying a laptop bag, but after a year discovered that the steel button on the inside of the bag had been wearing holes in my jeans. Not only that, it was too big for what I wanted to carry most of the time. I wanted something that was slim and sexy, just big enough for a few file folders and my usual support electronics. I ended up buying a Tumi bag at Marshall Fields for about $150. I’ve had the bag for almost two years and I love it! I don’t like spending a lot of money, but I will pay for quality, and this is a good bag. All was well in the world.
Now flashbask to spring 2006. I’m waiting in line to pick up my Anime Central passes in the Thursday night pre-reg pickup line. This is usually a long wait, so I’ve brought my bag and supporting goodies, my iPod, manga, and I’m reading Dream of the Red Chamber. After a while, two women in line behind me ask me about the book. And during our conversation, they notice my bag and refer to it as a man purse! Was I shocked? Not really, I was rather proud that the bag had drawn some attention, since it’s a really nice bag.
Back in the present, the issue 43 of Giant Robot has just come in the mail. There’s an article about Asian American Film Fests that includes humorous caricatures of the different types of people who attend these events. One of these features a film-maker wannabe who has a man purse. Then it all comes together and a quick Google search turns up the damning final evidence that I have indeed been pursed! Here are the links for your enjoyment.
As for me, I have no plans to stop carrying my bag. It’s useful and looks good, so if man purse it is, then so be it say I.
Today I discovered that my son also has the coveted onigiri hands of which I wrote previously. Together we fashioned 14 rice balls with a minimum of stickiness to our hands. The onigiri could not stand against our combined assault! It was a cool and super cute father son moment captured by my lady of the sticky palms in the bad cell phone pic below, if I bother to upload it that is! Next on the list of things to do is a rousing bout of Super Smash Brothers Melee!
OMG, what’s happened to New Zealand? Has it been taken over by prudish grandmothers? An ad for the Nissan Tiida featuring sexy banter from Sex and the City star, Kim Cattrall has been banned in New Zealand. Personally, I think the ad is a bit tame, but heck this gives me an excuse to see if I can link in a YouTube video properly. And heck, I still think Kim Cattrall, who also played Valeris in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, is pretty damn sexy. I might even buy a Tiida some day!
You hear a lot about so-called piracy on the internet these days. The record and movie industries have made quite a big deal about lost sales…yadda yadda yadda. Well here’s a reminder of what real piracy is, the story of a Japanese freighter fighting off pirates near Indonesia’s Sumatra island. Yes kids, there are real pirates in the world, oh and in a battle between pirates and ninja, why ninja would win of course! Ninja are better trained, that should be obvious! 😉
Today, despite some early storminess, we started the day with dim sum at the Phoenix in Chinatown, where I wowed the wait staff with the little Cantonese I’ve learned from my wife. Then we shopped some stalls in New Chinatown Square before heading west to Arlington Heights for the 25th Japan Festival. Not only that, I got back home in time to see Jeff Gordon win at Infinium!
The Japan Festival was a lot of fun. We hadn’t been to it since it used to be out at the Chicago Botanical Gardens. This year was the second for the festival at the Forest View Educational Center, just a stone’s throw from the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Arlington Heights IL. The gardens are nice, but they have a lot more room in the new location for events, and because of this, the rain outside really wasn’t a big issue.
Before the day was finished, we’d heard koto and violin concerts of traditional and contemporary Japanese music. The kids had fun breaking wooden boards with karate, and I enjoyed some long sought after takoyaki (octopus balls). And this time, I did not miss the Cha no yu, the tea ceremony! I also enjoyed the taiko performance with my youngest daughter, who had come with me to see it without my wife’s knowledge, which led to a somewhat embarrassing announcement of her being missing. But all was well, as parents must often suffer much loss of face because of their children. It just goes with the job. The kids had a good time. We finally ended our Pan-Asian adventure with a trip to the Mitsuwa Marketplace where I bumped into some of the young violin performers in the grocery store, which gave me a chance to thank them in person for a great performance.
Returning home, the day was completed with a Chinese dinner prepared by my lovely Chinese wife. She made me say that last part, though it is true! 😉 Here’s a bad cell phone picture of the taiko performance.
I finally got a chance the look at Connie Chung’s Swan Song on MSNBC this morning. It was pretty hard to listen too, but after reading the various media criticisms going around on the net and remembering the relative rockiness of the last decade or so of her career, I think this performance was a fun way of sticking it to the man. Connie Chung had the great misfortune to be on the way up in TV journalism at a time when it was dominated by white male anchors. It probably didn’t help that she was Asian on top of being a woman. So whatever other fair criticisms there may be of her style, she never really had a shot at having a top anchor position all to herself (that pairing with Rather was disasterous). So with nothing left to lose, she just let it fly. It was a wonderful “up yours” to the establishment, and even at 59, I must say she looked pretty hot doing it. Bravo!
I got email from Disney Mobile this morning. It looks like Mickey is in the phone business now and among other things, promises to give me the ability to track my kids’ phones via GPS. Move over Big Brother! Now admittedly, being able to track my kids may have some practical benefit, but despite my love of most technology, I’ll take a pass on GPS tracking. Parents today have a lot of tech tools to monitor/control their kids, but the real job of parenting is not going to be accomplished via V-chips, internet filters, and GPS tracking. I want my kids to develop discipline, self control. That means that I have to give up some control and allow them the room to make mistakes. And since this has worked fairly well for the thousands of years of human history prior to GPS satellites, it probably has a pretty good chance of working now, as long as I put the work into it. So sorry Mickey, I’ll just do it the old fashioned way.
Months ago I switched to Comcast cable for internet service because SBC DSL was just too unreliable in my neighborhood. But over that last several weeks I’d been seeing more outages. I didn’t think much of this because they were not as often as the old DSL had been. Then this morning, waking up not feeling too well, WillowBrow, who was also battling some nasty bug, tells me that the internet connection is out. She was already pretty pissed off for other reasons I won’t go into here.
I check the connection and do all of the usual things, power cycle, etc., and then call Comcast. Since I’m too sick for work anyway, I schedule a service call for the afternoon. I didn’t want to wait around doing nothing, so I checking the tv signal too. The standard cable channels looked fine, but the digital channels were suffering some heavy pixelation. After that it became clear to me that the problem was not on my end at all. Indeed, I’d been seeing more pixelation on all of the digital channels I usually watch, but had blamed it on TiVo bugs, sorry TiVo.
In the end, the technician found that too much bird poop on the ports in the cable box up the pole in back was a big part of the problem. So he took care of that and installed another device to import the signal and we were back in business, poop free.
Sigh… Another Friday night goes by and I’m not out shakin my bootay… Sigh… I’ve been a little down lately so here in the real world I languish at the computer feeling tired and wondering where my youth has gone. Meanwhile in Vana’diel I languish in on the borders of the Valkurm Dunes. I just need a magicked skull to complete the subjob quest, but right now I just don’t have the energy to go find a party to do it. God I need a pick me up!