Monday, November 28, 2005

Random 10 Answers.

Well, only one of you would hazard a guess on my "guess-the-lyric" Friday Random 10 post, so here are the answers to the other nine songs...

1. "You're given a flower but I guess there's just no pleasing you" ["Blue Orchid" by the White Stripes]
2. "Would you like to watch tv? Or get between the sheets? Or contemplate a silent freeway?" ["Just One of My Turns" by Pink Floyd]
3. "Are you ready for the Sucky-Sucky?" ["Bite Me" by the Electric Six]
4. "I’d be your lover, if you were there; Put your hurt on me, if you dare" ["Photograph" by Def Leppard]
5. "You realize the sun doesn't go down, it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round" ["Do You Realize?" by the Flaming Lips -- guessed by Fred.]
6. "Well I'm a high school grad I'm over 5 foot 3, I'll get a badge and a gun and I'll join the P.D." ["God is a Bullet" by Concrete Blonde]
7. "Bird in a flying cage you’ll never get to know me well" ["Man in a Suitcase" by the Police]
8. "So get the morgue embalm the goner" ["911 is a Joke" by Public Enemy]
9. "My mind goes sleepwalking while I'm putting the world to right" ["Oliver's Army" by Elvis Costello]
10. "Na de dil pardesi nu tainu nit da roona pai jau ga" ["Jogi" by Panjabi MC]

[sarcastic mode] Gee, I was so sure someone would guess #10. [/sarcastic mode]

Anyway, give these fine songs a listen sometime, won't you?

Monday, November 21, 2005

Five Questions.

From the wondrous world of Kass Rachel comes the popular LiveJournal "five questions" meme. Basically, someone asks you five interview-type questions, which you then answer in your blog. And, if anyone wants you to ask them five questions, they say so in the comments section. Got it? Good. Here we go...

1) What's fun about newspaper work?

It's hard to narrow it down to just one thing. There's the adrenaline rush of being in a newsroom on deadline, with a group of editors working together to get everything put to bed. There's the satisfaction of seeing your work published the next day (or posted online, what with this being the 21st century and all) and seeing the public's reaction. There's the geeky fun I have sitting in front of a computer and doing a page design, or worrying about textflow, or doing a thousand other nitpicky little things. There's the gossipy, catty fun of learning some big news before everyone else and then being the one to tell the world about it. (Which is a very powerful motivator to those who go into the journalism profession. Don't let them fool you with their explanations of the noble purposes of the press in a free society; we're just a bunch of folks who like to swap gossip over the back fence.) There's the camaraderie of the newsroom, which can be a rollicking fun place, especially when the deadline pressure builds. Plus, with my position having such a tutoring/mentoring component to it, there's the satisfaction of watching the students learn new skills and spread their wings.

2) If you could spend time inside any book or movie universe, which one would you choose and why?

Ah, yes. The all important fandom question. Somehow, I knew you'd get around to asking that. ;-)

I suppose it would be the X-Men universe, which comes from my past as a comics junkie. But only if I could have mutant powers of my own, too.

If not that, then it would probably be the bizarre non sequitur world of Coleman Francis. (Here is poorly-designed tribute page, which really gives the man more artistic credit than he deserves.) The only problem is that I don't like coffee. However, I am caught in the wheels of progress.

3) What has surprised you most about parenting so far?

Well, the stock answer to this question would involve the many hours of lost sleep, the sudden difficulty in keeping a clean house, or the new depths of joy and love you feel every time your children look up at you and simply smile. And all of that is very true. But what surprised me the most is not just how much pee and poop those little bodies can create, but also how heavy a full diaper really is. And, based on that, how hernia-inducing a full diaper pail can be.

4) What books were most formative for you, growing up?

For the sake of completeness, I'm going to use a fairly expansive definition of "growing up" here.

When I was preschool age, my parents didn't have much money to buy me a lot of books, so I had to make do with having the same ones read to me over and over. It was this repetition that helped me teach myself to read early on, and the book I remember most from that period is "Green Eggs and Ham."

Later on, there was this massive 500-page or so Marvel Comics activity book, which featured mazes, coloring pages, word games and other fun stuff based around their characters (circa late-'70s).

By junior high, it was Chris Claremont's stellar run of the X-Men.

Into high school and college, there was a very wide range of stuff, including "Wuthering Heights," "The Sound and the Fury," "Diane Arbus: A Biography" by Patricia Bosworth (along with Arbus' Aperture Monograph), "Fire in the Crucible" by John Briggs, Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time," Shakespeare (especially "Hamlet," "Othello" and "Macbeth"), "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," two George Orwell novels (the obligatory "1984" and the unheralded "A Clergyman's Daughter"), "Ball Four" by Jim Bouton, bits and pieces of Kierkegaard, Nietschze, Sartre and Camus, plus lots of others I'm forgetting to list right now.

But for all that, I still spent more time in front of the TV than with my nose buried in a book. Don't even get me started on the ways "The Gong Show" has influenced my life, and continues to do so.

5) What's your favorite food and why?

Another tough question, since I pretty much just eat to live, and not the other way around. A gourmet I am not, which is why my list of favorite foods would include pizza (especially with pepperoni and pineapple), candy corn, Hot Tamales, Flaming Hot Cheetos, maraschino cherries or most anything that makes my mouth burn. Outside the realm of junk food, though, my favorites are my grandmother's Fabulous Potatoes (no, she didn't name the recipe that, but yes, they are fabulous), for their prominent part of our family traditions, and Mary Ann's pork chops, for her unique seasoning which produces what I like to call "the crunchy bits."

And with that, I'll shut up now.

Life Update.

Yeah, it's been a while since I've posted much of substance. So, here's what's been going on in our lives lately...

• Our old car, the lovely Phat-Ass Escort, finally up and died. The cause of death was determined to be a fairly convoluted ignition problem that would cost more to fix than the car is worth. (Of course, changing the wiper blades would also have cost more than that car was worth.) So, after nearly a month without transportation, we finally got our loan paperwork straightened out an bought a new vehicle -- a 1996 Honda Odyssey. (Yep, having kids really does mesmerize you into buying a minivan. It's unavoidable.) It's got 131,000 miles on it, but was maintained in perfect condition. It's unbelievable how much this thing looks (and even smells a little) like it just came off the dealer's lot. Now we just have to avoid messing this one up, too.

(Her first time inside, Sarah said, "Ooh! Car big!")

• I'm finally getting to teach my first class, News Editing (see the woefully under-written course description here.) It's only a two-unit course, but it'll be a short and intensive, held over ULV's month-long interterm in January. Should be fun, and give me a chance to dwell in my newspaper production geekery.

• Sarah's comprehension of what's going on around her seems to grow by leaps and bounds everyday, as does the number of topics she likes to talk about. While most kids her age are busy vegging out in front of "Barney" or "Blue's Clues" or something, she's become an eager fan of "Star Trek" (specifically "The Next Generation" and "Deep Space 9" -- she even makes us all get up and dance to the ST:TNG theme song), "Mythbusters," "Brainiac," "In Living Color" and "Around the Horn."

One of her favorite phrases lately is "I'm just a baby." She typically uses it as a guilt-inducing preface for getting what she wants, i.e.: "I'm just a baby, need cuddles" or "I'm just a baby, need foodies." During her bath this morning, completely unprompted, she turned to me and explained, "I'm just a baby, sometimes I play."

• Hunter just turned four months old and is vocalizing up a storm (with much of it beginning to sound imitative of our speech). He's also strong and likes to try to throw himself about, as if he's trying to get down and follow Sarah in her play adventures about the house. Of course, this is followed by his frustration at not being able to crawl yet, much less walk. But it won't be too long now...

Friday, November 18, 2005

My Own Friday Random 10.

Over at Occasional Fish, Fred likes to spice up the familiar Friday Random 10 music meme by listing the lyrics of the songs and having his readers guess them. Well, turnabout's fair play, here's my random 10 lyric list. The songs are the last 10 to have played on my iTunes shuffle, after I filtered out the instrumentals, confusing covers (both of which I have a lot of), and repeats of songs by the same artist from the same album (random shuffle, my ass!):

1. "You're given a flower but I guess there's just no pleasing you"
2. "Would you like to watch tv? Or get between the sheets? Or contemplate a silent freeway?"
3. "Are you ready for the Sucky-Sucky?"
4. "I’d be your lover, if you were there; Put your hurt on me, if you dare"
5. "You realize the sun doesn't go down, it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round" [guessed by Fred.]
6. "Well I'm a high school grad I'm over 5 foot 3, I'll get a badge and a gun and I'll join the P.D."
7. "Bird in a flying cage you’ll never get to know me well"
8. "So get the morgue embalm the goner"
9. "My mind goes sleepwalking while I'm putting the world to right"
10. "Na de dil pardesi nu tainu nit da roona pai jau ga"

Needless to say, I'd be very surprised if my collective readership could guess them all. But give it a try!

Friday, November 11, 2005

A Sign of the Times.

Here's some bad news from the L.A. Times.

There are three things I find disturbing about this:

• The loss of Robert Scheer, one of the leading liberal voices in America. Sounds like management is caving into the pressure brought by all those wingnuts in high places who got agitated when he called them on their bullshit.

• The current abysmal state of editorial cartooning at American newspapers. Their shrinking numbers, and the fact that many papers are replacing them with work from syndicates, have steadly eroded the experience of the reader. And to see it happening at one of the country's major dailies (even if I never was much of a fan of Michael Ramirez's work) is especially disheartening. Oh, how I long for the days of Paul Conrad once again.

• Perhaps the most troubling thing about all this reorganization, though, is this little tidbit buried about halfway through the story -- new Editorial Page Editor AndrĂ©s Martinez will no longer report to the Times' editor in chief, but instead will report directly to publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson. A newspaper's op-ed section is its heart and soul, and the standard-bearer of its independence and integrity. But now to see the Times' influential op-ed section removed from the purview of the trained journalists and given over to the business interests of the paper -- well, that's just a shame. I predict impending tool-dom.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen....