I just don’t have the mental capacity to process the awesomeness of this.
Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: The video may be funny, but believe me, kids — there’s nothing funny about Bitchy Resting Face. I am a sufferer of the male equivalent, “Angry Resting Face”, in that my facial features seem to default to an expression that society has decided is equivalent to SMOLDERING RAGE. I wish I had a nickel for every time somebody walked by when I was just standing there and said, “Wow, you look like you’re ready to rip someone’s head off!”, when what I’m actually thinking is, “Do I want turkey or roast beef on my sub today?”
There’s a very odd societal thing we have going on right now where any facial expression that’s not a grin is interpreted to indicate a negative emotional state. It would be mildly annoying, but that gonzo assumption can have some unfortunate effects in the professional world.
:: I always wonder just what we’ll do in Buffalo if we ever get the waterfront developed, because that will eliminate one of the three major topics of discussion around here, leaving us stuck with the Bills (ugh) and the Sabres (double-ugh). But, over the last couple years, things are really starting to happen down there, which is nice. And in addition to the actual development that’s underway, we have also seen a very welcome reduction in the amount of gonzo ideas being tossed about for the waterfront. I, for one, am thrilled to see the Era Of Goofy Buffalo Waterfront Proposals come to an end!
Only…not everybody got that memo, because someone cooked up a really detailed idea for cable cars on the waterfront. And not San Francisco-style cable cars, either — we’re talking about the little ones that hang from an overhead cable. Like this:
What’s more, this isn’t envisioned as a tourist attraction or ‘something to do on the waterfront’. This person actually wants this cable car system to be part of Buffalo’s commuter infrastructure. People who work downtown would drive to the cable car station and ride the cable car to their downtown job, or to a Metro Rail station so they might then get to their job. Cable car systems of this type — or ‘aerial trams’ — aren’t the fastest moving of transportation systems, so how they’d be embraced by commuters is hard to imagine.
The article concludes with this: “Even our long-held hopes of rapid transit to Niagara Falls and the Airport might one day be possible for far less money than expanding MetroRail!” Did I read that right? An aerial tram from Buffalo to Niagara Falls, which is 25 miles away? Aerial trams don’t tend to go much over 30 mph, so are we really expecting people to sit in an aerial tram for an hour to get to a place they could drive to in less than half that?
Now, I like cable cars/aerial trams. I like riding the ones at amusement parks. And I’m sure I’ll have a thrilling time riding one if I ever vacation in Switzerland. But as a major part of a city’s transportation infrastructure? A flat city like Buffalo that already has tons of roads, surface parking never more than a block away downtown, and declining population?
Oy.
Oh well. More next week!
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It's all her fault.
If my mother hadn’t instilled in me a freakish love of books, Casa Jaquandor wouldn’t look like this.
(Well, that’s not entirely accurate…it’s not her fault that my filing system is based on the age-old concept of the “Teetering Stack of Doom”. That’s all me. But believe me, the first thing I’m gonna buy with the money from the inevitable movie deal for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title)? Shelves!)
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Everything I need to celebrate John Scalzi's birthday!
Happy birthday to a guy of whom I am eternally jealous and for whom I wish a swift, swift descent into madness and doom! (But not for a while yet. I do enjoy his writing, after all. So I hope he gets another 6-12 books done…but after that? DOOM!!!!!)
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Tales in the Photo
OK, there’s a photo making the rounds on the Internet via various sports fansites and gossip whatevers. It’s of a nicely-dressed blond woman making an effort-filled obscene gesture in the face of one of the opposing team’s players at an NBA game. (I’ll put this below the fold, because it is an obscene gesture.)
Here’s the photo:
I really don’t have anything much to say about the act she’s committing, other than this is yet one more example of why I am less and less interested in sports fandom, seeing as how it often leads to this kind of classless rage that’s just ugly and useless.
What gets me about this photo, though, isn’t the lady. Nor is it her date, who is also apparently shouting things whilst holding her to keep her from falling over the rail. Nor is it even the player who has his head down and just wants to get off the floor. What gets me is the black fellow in the suit. I’m not sure what he does there, but he’s clearly an employee of some sort; he has a lanyard ’round his neck. Maybe he’s stadium security or an NBA official or something like that. But with this going on right in front of him, he’s paying attention to none of it. He’s just kind-of staring off into the space between the player and the extended middle finger being offered, and his expression is so blank and hopeless that he might as well be a middle-manager in the office of some company that’s having low-to-moderate sales growth this year.
So in the middle of “I just wanna go the locker room” and “I HATE YOU SO MUCH AGGHHHHH!!!”, there’s this guy apparently thinking, “When this is over, I gotta finish my TPS reports.”
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Something for Thursday
National Coconut Cream Pie Day?
A Marie Callender’s Coconut Cream Pie, prior to dispatch into my face, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.
Apparently it’s today. National Pie Day, Pi Day, and now this. I miss all the cool stuff!
[pouts]
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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
A Vignette
She didn’t look elegant at first, with her enormous purse on her shoulder and her white NorthFace fleece jacket. She wore her shoulder-length hair in a tousled style, and her glasses were slightly off-angle. But her lips were rose-red, she had solid control of that purse, and her white jacket was immaculate.
There was a bookcase between where she was standing and where I was working at one of the tables, and she stood there, against that bookcase, looking around the library as if she was supposed to be meeting someone. But there was something nervous about the way she was doing it: she was looking around quickly, right to left to right to left, drumming the fingers of her left hand on the bookcase as she did so. I wondered what she was so nervous about. Was she having a clandestine meeting with an old lover, perhaps? What an odd place to do that – the public library where just several feet away was a guy pounding away on his Macbook, and two old guys sitting by the magazines talking about their respective health troubles.
But as she drummed her fingers on the top of the bookcase, I could see that she wore no ring on any of her fingers.
She decided that she had arrived before her expected party, and opted to sit down. So she came around the bookcase, into the area where the tables were. She had on a skirt of brilliant crimson, the most wonderful red ever. Somehow the skirt matched her lips exactly. She put the purse on the table next to mine and took off the white Northface jacket. The skirt was actually the bottom of a dress, the whole of which was that gorgeous red. The V-neck didn’t plunge too deep, and she wore a necklace of wooden beads that rattled ever so softly – had we been anyplace other than the library, I wouldn’t have heard them. She slung her jacket onto a chair and started unpacking her purse.
The beautiful red dress was also a maternity dress.
She pulled out a purple plastic water bottle, and her keys which hung from a long lanyard. She also pulled out a spiral-bound notebook and an iPad. Her nervousness from before disappeared entirely, which struck me as odd – if she could set that feeling aside so easily, why had she been nervous in the first place? She sat down and went right to work, taking absolutely no notice of anyone around her. She alternated between tapping the touchscreen of her iPad – only using her slender index finger – and jotting notes in her notebook with a number-two pencil. I returned to my writing.
Minutes later, her awaited party showed up. A teenaged girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen. The girl plunked her bookbag down on the table. “Hi!” the woman said, looking up and giving the girl a radiant smile.
“Hi,” said the girl. “OMG, you look amazing!”
“Thank you!” said the woman. “How was your break?”
“It was OK. We didn’t go anywhere.”
“Sometimes that’s the best kind of vacation. So, where were we?”
The girl pulled a thick textbook from her bookbag. “The Depression just started.”
“Bummer!” The woman laughed. “All right, let’s get into it. Can you tell me some of the causes of the Depression?”
Ah, I thought. That was it: she was a tutor. There tended to be a lot of them in the after-school hours at the library, and we were now sliding into that time of day. Their conversation delved into the Depression, and my attention returned to my writing. I spared one last look at the pregnant woman in red before I left, though.
Why had she been so nervous at the start?
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Sentential Links
I have linkage for you. You will click them. And then we will all frolic in the Land of Links!
:: If nothing else, that phone call was a valuable reminder that words have power, and the online world is not so insulated from the real world as we all like to believe. (This is a very powerful post…but you have to read his backstory to get it. It’s all very sad, all the way around.)
:: Oh, man, Darrin’s bio-dad is just not going to give up on his mission of assholery, is he? I have literally no idea what he thinks is going to happen if he goes public with the knowledge that Dead Lisa had sex as a teenager and had a kid and gave it up for adoption. (This storyline on Funky Winkerbean is seriously goofy. There’s this guy who keeps lurking around and sneering and saying things like “Soon we’ll all be one happy family again!” FW is one of the worst things ever, and yet, I can’t look away. It’s like getting to drive by a mangled car wreck each and every day, in which nobody actually died. Except the fictional characters, who all suffer endlessly.)
:: Tycho Brahe, apparently, used to put on his court robes every time he looked through a telescope.
One must approach one’s work with awe and respect.
I think that’s really cool. (As I noted in Sheila’s comments, I’ve over the last several months stopped writing in my PJs and whatnot. I dress for work. Even if it’s putting on overalls, it’s something. I’m getting to work.)
:: Because there has not been a triumph of reason over irrational fear, or an embracing of the statistically probable over the unlikely (or some might say a return of denial to avoid messy reality), but rather a choice to live my life in a more peaceful way. I learned in war that violence can happen to me, a white kid from suburban Buffalo. I learned it is not something that just happens to other people. I learned that when you are being shot at you should take cover behind your weapon. That if you are shooting at them they will put their head down and not shoot back at you. That when bullets fly – and they will, remember – that I should fight and not hide. (Brian Castner is a deeply thoughtful individual with whom I do not always agree, and with whom my disagreements almost always prompt me to at least think a bit more about my position; even if I usually come back around to my original way of thinking, I’m on better footing. My opinion of guns has not changed, but I’ve considered it more.)
:: The great thing is that I’ve met lots of new and interesting people out there in the blogosphere, with many viewpoints and stories to tell. I expect I’ll continue to visit them from time to time. Another benefit of this challenge has been the act of blogging every day without fail – getting into the habit and making it part of what I do. I’m also happy that I actually had something to say, whether it was in poetry, a quote or just a few words about wellbeing, which is very important to me. (This really is the main benefit of the A-to-Z Challenge. For me, I have found that two years in a row, it results in a brief and small influx of new readers, but they all tend to disappear again. If there’s one thing that bothers me about blogging here in 2013, it’s that the old sense in Blogistan of various communities emerging doesn’t seem to happen much anymore. But I’ll do it again next year; in fact, I’ve already picked my category.)
:: The main knock on the iPad as a camera is that the thing is big and people look goofy taking pictures with it. But, you know. If you’re the sort of person who judges another person for using an iPad to take a picture, who is the actual asshole in that scenario? Hint: Probably not the dude holding the iPad. (This really doesn’t bother me, although it can get distracting at things like school concerts. You can always tell which parents have kids onstage for each ensemble because all of a sudden, a whole new set of iPads get waved in the air.)
More next week!