Thirty Days Hath September

It's over already. Stores have their Halloween decorations up (many have had them up for weeks). The sun is starting to go to bed early.

The first Presidential debate is tonight. I was really annoyed when on the radio yesterday I heard about a poll asking people who they think will win the debate. George Bush was proclaimed the victor. What the hell is with that? How useless is most of the American media? The whole thing is decided before it even happens. Second the idea that there is a winner of the debate is a stupid idea. The debate is supposed to be a forum for the candidates to express their views to the American people. If you convince the most people they will vote for you and you will be elected. But it seems the way it works is the press will tell you who has "won" the debate before it takes place so you should vote for that person unless you don't want to vote for him, but then there's no real point in voting because your guy has already lost. And they wonder why people don't vote.

Miss Understanding

"Ok, I'll call you back at one," said Dave in Dallas.
"So one o'clock Central time? Two o'clock my time?" I asked.
"Yes, one o'clock."
I came back from lunch at 1:55 p.m. and had a message waiting for me. It was left at 12:01. "Hi, this is Dave. Calling you for our meeting. Call me back."
When I called back I asked, "We said o'clock your time. Two my time."
"Oh, I had already converted it so when I said one o'clock I was talking Eastern Time since that's where you are."

On Sunday I got a call from Claudia asking me if I was free for dinner Monday with her and Ray and family. I told her a friend was in from out-of-town and I had plans. "Well, how about next Wednesday then?" she asked.
"Next Wednesday?" I asked, emphasizing the first word. "Next week?"
"Yeah, next week. Next Wednesday."
"Sure, that sounds good," I replied.
I got a call this morning, this Wednesday, asking about dinner tonight.
"No, we said next Wednesday, not this Wednesday. I have plans for tonight."
In the Midwest where I am from originally "next Wednesday" means the one after "this Wednesday". If it is Sunday then "next Wednesday" is a week from "this coming Wednesday". But I've found that sometimes people, especially in the East, mean "the next Wednesday that comes" or as we say, "this Wednesday".
I am amazed at how often we miscommunicate and misunderstand each other speaking the same language. People sometimes think I am overly cautious when planning things like when to meet and where. This is why. This is why I repeated the times above with emphasis on the parts I thought would make it clear we would be on the same page. Doesn't always work.

Cross Examination

The lawyer for the defense approaches the witness stand. "So you stated earlier Mr. Humboldt that you were at first mistaken about the color of the car that night."
"That's correct."
"You were wrong," the attorney continues.
"I was mistaken about the color. It was a dark blue car, not black. But it was night," answered the witness.
"Do you not admit that 'wrong' and 'mistaken' mean the same thing?"
"Not the exact same, no."
"Can you be mistaken and be right?"
"No."
"So if you are mistaken you are wrong?"
"Well..."
"So when you said the car was dark blue you were either lying or a very poor witness because you were in fact wrong."
"I got all the other details right. The make and model. The year of the car. The huge dent on the driver's side door."
"Are you sure the dent was on the driver's side?"
"Yes."
"As sure as you were about the color of the car?"
"More certain."
"What makes you so certain?"
"The man getting into the car had a difficult time opening the door."
"What if I told you there was no dent on the driver's side door? Would you be as certain?"
"I know what I saw," answered the witness. The defense lawyer turns toward the jury and shakes his head. He dismisses the witness. Everything the witness said was true but he had been wrong about the color of the getaway car. The defendent did rob the store. He did shoot thr store owner and he did drive away in a '92 Buick Le Sabre. Still the jury can't commit and a guilty man walks free.

This is how I feel about the whole CBS/Dan Rather/George Bush/National Guard incident. It was all an elaborate plot to discredit the witness so that everything CBS says is doubted. There's an old debate argument whose Latin phrase translates as "wrong in part, wrong in all". Pull apart some small part and discredit the whole story.
Did CBS screw up? Yes. Was George W. a screwup when he was young and pull strings with his wealthy connections to avoid going to Vietnam and having to do any real service in the National Guard? Of course.

Beer Durham

I went to the Durham World Beer Festival on Saturday afternoon at the old Durham Bulls Ballpark with my friends Stephen, Geruad and Melissa. It was my first time going and we had a lot of fun. Although they didn't have much of a wine list they had some great beer. Our favorites were a Milk Stout by a brewery we can't remember the name of and a Thai lager called Singha. I also really liked the Woodchuck brand Hard Pear Cider which was great on a cool fall day.
Here are some photos.

Quote of the Day

Happy Birthday Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.

"What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Pros and Cons

"Excuse me. Will you please listen to me? I'm not a bum. No one else would even stop and listen to me," said the guy walking up to us in the Harris Teeter parking lot. My coworker Jim and I were going into the grocery store to get lunch.
"I hope you guys can help me out. I'm not a bum. I have a job. I work for Chapel Hill Movers." He was wearing a Chapel Hill Movers t-shirt. "My truck ran out of gas and like an idiot I left my wallet at home and I'm in a huge hurry." He slapped his forehead at the word 'idiot'. "Could either of you see about lending me like five dollars for gas? I can pay you back. I have lots of money, just none with me. If you will give me your address or phone number I will send you the money."
I knew I had four dollars cash on me. Jim opened up his wallet and showed it was empty. "I'm just going inside to get some lunch and gonna pay with my credit card. Sorry."
I took out my four singles and gave them to him.
"That's all I have."
"Jeez, thanks. Give me your address or phone number so I can pay you back." I took out a card from my wallet with my work address and phone. "This totally helps me out. My daughter will be wating for me across town."
When he mentioned his daughter I knew I would never see my four dollars again. That's just too much. He should have left it at the out-of-gas without the embellishment. You already have the money. No need for the emotional high-note of the young girl waiting sadly by herself. That's the oldest trick in the book after the "Homeless Veteran, Hungry, God Bless" sign.
Usually I don't give money on the street. I've heard every story before: out of gas, need jumper cables-no, money for a battery instead, need bus fare to Winston-Salem, travling cross country and need a hand. Usually I see the same people a few days later, still out of gas, still needing to get home, still needing a few bucks. This time I just gave the four dollars. If he suckered me I'm not out much. If he suckered me and really needed the money for something other than drugs or booze, good luck to him. If he was telling the truth then I helped someone out.

Quote of the Day

"I have had many troubles, but the worst of them never came."
-James A. Garfield

Quote of the Day

"Every one of us lives his life just once; if we are honest, to live once is enough."
-Greta Garbo

Quote of the Day

When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me: 'Finish your dinner-people in China are starving.' I, by contrast, find myself wanting to say to my daughters: 'Finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your job.'"
- Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times Columnist

"how to record truth truly"

"These novels will give way, by and by, to di­aries or autobiographies--captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his ex­perience, and how to record truth truly."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was rereading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and found at the beginning the quote above by Emerson about the demise of the forms of fiction as biography and memoir became more compelling. Following this quote are 300 pages of something not quite fiction but not quite reality either. Still they are filled with truth.
I immediately thought about television and the rise of reality shows. Then I thought about the Internet. Blogs are the new reality television, someone once said who may have been me. But reality TV almost always snatches up people from their everyday lives and plants them down in games like the clay toys of Laurence Olivier's Zeus in Clash of the Titans. As Heisenberg stated in his Unreality principal, the more you try to observe reality on television the less certain you can be that it reflects reality.
I have been a regular reader of a few personal blogs on the Internet, my favorites are Nerve.com's Blog-A-Log. Even here amid the hookups and hard living, reality is watered down to shield the feelings and tastes of unnamed family and lovers. Bits of truth so rich and so common are left out of the daily sauce of life so the writer doesn't have to hear, "Is that really what you think of me?" or "I'm so embarrassed you wrote that." So names and stories are changed or left out. Or they are written down in pages hidden from the rest of the world. Or they are stored away from ink and paper, from keyboard and electronic pulses. Their ripeness is too sweet for most of the world and need to dry into prunes before they can be a source of moral fiber.
I also was reading about the Lewis and Clark expedition and was taken by comments about what the explorers left out of their journals. Missing are the very mundane things. What did they do to pass the time at night? Who in the group was the most annoying or had the best sense of humor? What songs did you sing along the way? What was the best thing you ate along the way? Who took care of the dog during the trip and what happened to him? How did they cope for two years without female companionship? Were any of the men on the voyage homosexual? Did anyone hook up with any female Native Americans along the way? What personal items did you bring from home? What did you always carry in your pockets? What was the greatest surprise on your trip? Was the return home a disappointment?
People leave out so much of life when relating to others. Maybe this is good for the most part. Who hasn't been bored by a laundry list of minuscule detail in a neighbor's endless story? Who hasn't been annoyed by the efforts of someone with a constant hunger for attention to shock us with the frank details of their prurient encounters? If every story included the contents of Leopold Bloom's drawer or the exploits of Henry Miller's love life the world would bored and scandalized at the same time.
"That's just TMI!" someone said to me recently.
"What's TMI?" I asked.
"Too Much Information!"
I don't remember what I was talking about but it was probably some point of everyday life that we all deal with. Those kinds of things don't bother me. I like knowing that everyone else goes through the same things I do, that their skin breaks out, that they especially like having their neck kissed, that they get gassy from brussel sprouts.
IAG!
It's All Good.

One Hundred Favorite Movies

This weekend my friend Geraud showed me the list he made of his favorite 100 movies. I decided to do the same. Here it is.

Some notes about my picks:
These are my favorite movies. By favorite I mean movies I would watch over again and again and still enjoy or find something remarkable in. Or they may be flims that have had a profound impact on my view of the world. If you don't like my list, make your own.
Two of the entries consist of two movies. Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources work together as one film. Same for My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle. Each of the pairs were made in the same year and stand up and one film if the attention span of the American audience were longer. Other movies like Godfather Parts I and II and the first Star Wars movies came out years apart and can stand alone. For God's sake if you ever are presented with the horrible creation called the Godfather Sage which reedited the first two movies into chronological order, showing young Vito before his daughter's wedding, recycle it for soda bottles and get the two movies separately.

Some statistics about my list:
Movie Breakdown by Decade:
1930s: 7
1940s: 4
1950s: 5
1960s: 7
1970s: 15
1980s: 25
1990s: 29
2000s: 8

Year with the most movies on the list (7 movies): 1994

Director with most movies on list (4 movies): Billy Wilder

Number of directors with more than one movie on the list: 16

Number of movies directed by Kevin Smith: 0

Actor or actress who appears in the most movies (4): Emma Thompson

Number of movies in which Peter Sarsgaard appears: 0

Movie whose title comes from a line in another movie on the list: The Usual Suspects

Number of movies I saw for the first time on TV or video: 44

Percentage of movies on list made before I was born: 23%

Percentage of movies that are at least partially in black and white: 19%

Percentage of movies in languages othern than English: 10%

Letters of the alphabet with which no movies titles begin: k o q x z

rub a dub

Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi Shall Be My Sword!

I took this photo after the afternoon sun shone threw my window and woke me up on the couch. If I were a superstitious man I would think it a sign from higher powers.

Pillow Fight

I've been fighting sleep lately. Sleeping soundly, but odd hours. It starts with one late night of high energy that keeps me up until two. Next morning is hell, waking up late, still tired with little time to get ready for work. Tired all day I'll come home and nap after work probably having skipped going to the gym because of little energy. The nap by definition is supposed to be short but I'll end up waking up totally refreshed at 10:00 or 11:00. This keeps me up as late or later than the night before and I have a hard time catching up.

Sleep is such a strange thing. I can be totally tired, practically dozing off all day at work, come home and lie down on the sofa for a quick nap. Then I'll see that Jeopardy is on TV and I stay awake through the commercials so I don't miss any questions. When it's over I am wide awake without a nap. Yesterday I did a nap from about 8:00 to 1:00 a.m. (I guess it's hard to call anything over 3 hours a nap, but there you go) after which I was totally refreshed and read and watched TV and played on the computer. By 4:00 am I decided I had better try to get back to sleep though I wasn't the least bit sleepy. Still, I hit the pillow. I must have turned off the alarm when it rang at 7:00 because when my eyes opened again it was quarter to nine. And I was exhausted.

I hope with the long weekend I can set things right.

Package

I got another book today. A used book that's not used. From Amazon's used booksellers. It came today in a king-size yellow envelope taped all around with thick clear plastic tape so that none of the paper was exposed. When I cut through an odd smell of clove and grape Kool-Aid powder wafted out. It's a book of photographs by Jim Erickson called Mother. I love art photo books but can't pay full retail for them. I'll take it home and leave it on the coffee table for a few weeks, looking at it during commercials.
I've been trying to check the used bookstores before I bought any books new. But Amazon is so easy. Not good for an impulsive nature.
My plan is to replace the cinder block bookshelves in my living room this year. The unfinished furniture store with the mission-style shelves I like doesn't have any in. They keep telling me to call back next week, on Monday after the truck comes. "Nope, not today," they've said for the past three weeks.
In planning bookshelves one has to account for future acquisitions. A few years ago my rate of growth was 3 feet of books a year. This year it’s already been four feet and it’s not even fall.
Some people’s homes have books. Some don’t. I prefer the people with books. I have books in every room of my house.

The woman in the office next has been loud on the phone all day. This morning she was arguing with a relative repeating the same phrases over and over again as if this would change his mind. “Why do you think I would say that? What possible reason could I have? None. So why would you believe them over me? That’s insane!” When she hung up the phone she then came to my office to apologize for being loud and to then recap the conversation I had just heard. Later when someone down the hall walked by she apologized to him and again recounted the phone conversation. She is on the phone with someone else telling them the story. Think I’ll go home a read my book.