876.2.

Rode to SSU after work and caught the bus home from there. Nice that the busses have bike racks -- but if there are more than two bikes there's gonna be trouble (and there are only two busses going from SSU to Sebastopol morning and evening, so you can't just wait for another).

Blow (2001): "Blew" almost twenty dollars on this and popcorn last night. Pretty great cast populates a story that had me wondering why they bothered to make a movie. The original book, evidently, is an attempt by a convicted coke dealer to somehow redeem himself. But I couldn't muster much (any) sympathy for the character. I couldn't muster much hatred for him either. What is this movie trying to tell me? That cocaine is a huge waste of time and money and it ruins your life? Wow - see "Pink Pearl" reference from yesterday's blog. (BTW, Pink Pearls are those erasers you used in elementary school.) I had exactly the same experience through the 80s -- sans Pee-Wee Herman and millions of dollars -- and I admit I've written about it, but it's such a common story, I never dreamed anyone would bother to write an entire book, sell it as a screenplay, and get top-name actors to grace it with their presence! But I guess in jail you have time for making impossible dreams come true. Most disturbing to me was a scene where they have literally so much money they've filled the house and have no place to put it, with Depp's voiceover - "If you were buying coke in America in the early 80s, we had some of your money."

But Johnny Depp is always a treat. Ray Liotta and Rachel Griffiths as the father and mother were great. If nothing else, it was entertaining through the first hour or so. Five stars out of ten.

It's great to have a theatre within walking distance. Look forward to more current movie reviews here once we hit our stride on catching the $4.50 matinees.

Maybe 911 is a joke, and maybe it isn't, but I know for certain that the phone company's DSL service is a BIG joke.

871.2.

Had to try the straight-down-116 route; chopping five miles off was just too tempting. Sometimes, too, what you see from the car, bike-safety- and shoulder-wise, is different from what you might experience on the actual bicycle and shoulder. At any rate, it makes the ride manageable at 14.4 miles, but one of those miles is pretty scary.

I think I'm going to have to sleep with someone at CalTrans to try and get a bike path installed over that one hill, because otherwise it's a perfectly lovely ride, and somehow much better than all those extra miles on Smoggy Point Road (this morning, only about half a mile on S.P.).

Reading random blogs, and reflecting on a guy at work... of course, nobody thinks their thoughts aren't deep, or that their ideas are not fresh and significant. But man, most people's insights are about as penetrating as a Pink Pearl.

This guy at work, one of those people who, for whatever reason -- maybe NO reason, I instantly dislike. I can prove the existence of love at first sight, because there are people about whom, at first sight, I am entirely apathetic. If the opposite exists, and the middle exists, so must the balancing factor.

There's a hole in that logic somewhere... If dislike-at-first-sight exists, does that really prove its opposite? Black exists, ergo white? Not a universally provable law, and certainly not provable in terms of human interaction. But apathy exists as does its opposite love, so maybe apathy-at-first-sight proves love-at-first-sight. Yeah, I have all KINDS of time for THIS question.

Anyway. This guy, I treat with civility when I must speak to him, but I try to ignore him otherwise. Yesterday, he was at the door heading out when I was heading out for my coffee, and I sorta mumbled 'tsup as I do (having come from TSUP - Technical Support - at SBT), and he had this monumentally witty and humorous reply: "the sky." He's already demonstrated a fullness of 'jokes' like that...

And there are a million billion trillion possible replies ("<coff!> you'd better dust that off before you pull it out and use it again."), but none very polite and none that don't show that I think the guy is a complete and utter buffoon (what I'm thinking is something along the lines of "I could not have thought of a stupider reply unless a plane had been passing directly overhead with Resident Bush in it"). So I just don't say anything and continue on my merry way (probably showing still, by the way, that I think he is a complete and utter buffoon).

But I still have to work in the same building and interact with the guy. So I have to ask myself - why did I dislike the guy so, immediately on sight, with no particular provocation - and how did I know (what turned out to be true), right away, just by looking at him, that his personality just doesn't meet mine?

You know, I used to have an answer to that same "what's up" question: "The direction from which things fall." Haha. I used it maybe three or four times and retired it. So you can perhaps understand my non-plussedness at his "the sky."

I imagine he thinks his comments are very very witty, and that he is a wit among wits when delivering his "the sky" repartee on a moment's notice.

I imagine he has delivered this snappy comeback a hundred times or more in his lifetime, and he's not done yet.

I imagine that, for him, jokes don't wear thin, develop age-spots, grow wrinkly and flabby and die.

I imagine that, to him, I'm just some null character who appears before him, desperately needing his day-brightening line, delivered with sterling timing, sharp as a friggin tack, no moss growing on HIM nope! And he walks on whistling a merry tune, having dumped the dusty, putrid, soft-centered, half-fermented fruit of his intellect on said unsuspecting non-entity.

I try to imagine BEING him, so I can understand how to interact. Do you think he makes any kind of reciprocal attempt?

Sigh.

856.8.

Long, at times agonizing ride home, but I made it. I swear I almost fainted when delicious onion-ring smell wafted over me in Sebastopol passing the Powerhouse Brewery, and I'd have killed for half a gram of salt. This ride is not generally as good scenery-wise as my old 3.5-, 6-, and 12-mile rides -- lots of traffic most of the way, the whizzing-by kind AND the turning-in-front-of-you kind. But there are a few nice stretches - the 5-mile path out of Sebastopol, southern Smoggy Point (between groups of cars), and Railroad Ave. Leg muscles quite sore last night, but not that bad today. May ride it again tomorrow and feel like I've accomplished something this week. Noted that 116 SE from Sebastopol to Smoggy Point is 7 miles - 5 less than taking the path due east and Smoggy Point due south. Not quit ethe calculation Pythagorus would've arrived at, but they didn't have bicycles back then.

If I could take route 116 and all of Smoggy Point on the bike (i.e. if the county/state/US would construct reasonable shoulders and/or bike paths), I could get to work slightly under 14 miles. But I can't and they don't, so it's a 40-mile day. Took a slightly different route home last night; which appears to have shaved off almost a mile, but goes through more suburban streets, strip malls, soccer moms, etc. Will check into the bus service - can take a bus from right near the house to SSU - from there only about 6 miles (on hawk-heavy Petaluma Hill Road) to work.

MUST get another water bottle on the bike before hot summer days. I don't drink enough water when stationary; and I need to start making myself remember to stop and drink while riding and while not riding.

At any rate, though it was tough riding yesterday, it was doable, and if I continue to do it often enough, it'll get easier. Feels good.

Day 4 of the computer crisis. So stupid. They're not even going to be putting my stuff on the new machine, not even putting the old perfectly-good hard drive in, so what's taking so friggin' long?!? First estimate was "friday night or monday morning." It's now uh Wednesday morning?

AT&T @home would not forward email and deleted our old email accounts like IMMEDIATELY, and then Yahoo complained because mlevel@home.com is bouncing email. Now I'm out of several of my groups because I converted steve@born-today.com to be the new main account. The other groups on which steve@b-t was not previously a member, just disappeared. Oh well, I was getting tired of those other four or five groups anyhow (NOT). The only one really missing is the private 'steve&terrie' list, though there's no traffic there. We'll get that straightened out.

Getting used to this machine, left by an ex-coworker, but can't install software I need... So am not entirely wasting time here, but am working about 50% slower than usual.

837.0.

Road Rash rides again! 20.7 miles from the new place to work - NOT a ride I'm likely to be doing daily anytime soon, but not a bad one overall. Thing is the second half - getting home tonight, totalling to a 42-mile day, so ask me again at 8 tonight about how great it is! Not a single hill as large as the old one on Fair/Bailey - never lower than about the 2-5 gear - mostly between 2-6 and 3-8. Mostly flat and with decent shoulders -- the first five miles on a bike/walking path with no cars. Averaging around 12mph, an hour and a half ride. Still, a new chapter in Road Rash, and I'm glad to find I can make it to work on my bike, and can even double or triple my previous weekly mileage by simply riding in twice or thrice a week - maybe this additional riding will finally create slimness on my pathetic body. The route follows highway 12 on the parallel bike path out of Sebastopol, to Stony Point Road, then south on Stony Point to Railroad Avenue. East on RR to Redwood Highway, thence to work. I avoid almost all narrow/non-shoulder areas, and there are a couple of variations I can try later. This route avoids the treacherous-looking (but diagonal, and thus probably substantially shorter) Rte 116 out of Sebastopol; I'll measure the miles by car from Sebastopol to Stony Point on 116 - it's 12 miles via bike path and Stony Point.

I think I need bearings repacked around the front crank.
Also ate breakfast today, having resolved to live a healthier life... Maybe next time I ride the bike I won't smoke till after the ride. It's somewhat easier to avoid that first cig if you're not in the standard routine of coffee & shower -- the coffee water takes just a cig's time to boil, and otherwise you're standing there watching it...

Again watched Sarah Vaughan documentary "The Divine One" last night. What a cool woman, and great singer. Unsung (heh) as one of the great independent women of the early- mid-20th century, Sarah evidently got by without heroin -- and to a large extent without men -- controlling her life, and made some of the most amazing, beautiful music of her time. Plus, she was a total babe, early on... I'm happy to have made Sassy's acquaintance through numerous records and CDs, and especially now through this video, which I can take out and watch every now and then. It's also cool to see the likes of Billy Eckstine and Roy Haynes reminiscing about her...

Still no new machine, but promised for later today. Also, should get DSL activated at home today - but will believe when I see both. Everything on the web - email, schedule, etc., I'd need three browser windows running to do what I normally have with outlook etc. A Pain.

Oy. They replaced my drive Friday into a machine that locked up 7 times during the course of the day, sometimes without me even doing anything. Disabled screensaver and other startup crap, still locking up (four times or more today -- obsessive-compulsive though I am, I've lost count), and currently it sits with a blue screen. They are building me a new computer. Which "won't be ready till this evening or tomorrow." Version control system is inaccessible at the moment, so can't get the stuff I checked in. So much for the paperless office.

Bela Fleck and the Flecktones last night. Awesome. At the risk of crying wolf superlative-wise, Victor Wooten is simply the best bass player I've ever seen or heard. He gets his own solo spot in the first half of the show - about 30 minutes of solo bass - and fills it up admirably, detuning the bass, coaxing an incredible array of sounds from an almost-clean-amped bass (he did have an autowah/ring-modulator kind of effect on it [lady behind us: "Is that the whammy bar?" {for the uninitiated, there are few if any basses with 'whammy bars'}]), often playing two or more different melodies/rhythm patterns simultaneously.

Everybody in the band is an exceptional musician, though, and nobody is really the "star."

Fleck plays acoustic and electric banjoes, and for one number, a funny-looking guitar. As is often the case with banjo music, you don't always hear how good it actually is from among the flurries of high-speed fingerpicking. But when Fleck sits alone on stage with an acoustic banjo and manages the Vince Guaraldi "Peanuts" theme, alone on a banjo, it's impressive.

"Futureman" plays his homemade drum/sample machine like a guitar, with half a drum kit beside him that he occasionally plays on one-handed. The "drum solo," opening the second half, is much more than that, incorporating percussion, found sounds, sampled instrumental noises, and phenomenal polyrhythmic polyphony. (christ, now I'm in rock-critic-land...)

It's the gimmickry that wins most of the crowd, though. When the bassoon player (an excellent player with a clean bassoon), does an extended solo through a synthesizer, making his instrument deliver saxophone, guitar, and other sounds, the crowd went wild (though it requires virtually no extra effort on his part to switch the synth to deliver any other instrument that's in its banks of samples...)

Nobody in this band follows the main beat; everyone's riffing on it, flirting with it. Typical tunes start with a relatively simple melody, each player taking a solo expounding on that, taking it farther and farther afield, eventually coming back "home" to it - SOP for improvisational jazz, but this is nominally a bluegrass group. They are fearless in their choices of music to attempt - classical, jazz, country, rock - no genre is safe from the Flecktones!

Each player brings amazing feats of musicianship, moments of humor, and a nice (rare) humility to the stage.

Perhaps because I'm tired, or because I'm old, I get fidgety in the last half-hour or so before the encores. When everybody's burning it up at once, there's nothing to hang your hat on sonically or visually, and it tends to blend into a big mass of sound and activity (for me), and you might get a little bored. And when the guy behind you keeps yelling high-pitched wolf-calls at all the wrong times, you might get a little annoyed, especially when his noise interferes with your ability to hear a particular stretch of music...

Still, that Wooten! 8 stars out of ten - check it out!