fine whine

Oh boy, am I excited. Sometime today they're going to be coming to my cubicle with a new 17" monitor, to replace mine. The one I have is okay and all except for some odd quirks. Namely, it has some streaking issues whereby white windows bleed green (to the right only) over scrollbars and borders. It has something to do with the light and dark balance of what is on screen, and I've controlled it somewhat in the past with cunning use of dim or bright wallpaper, as need be.

I'd mentioned my problems to somebody a little higher up the other day (we were talking about them giving me a new desktop but keeping my plagued monitor) and today she told me to call the help desk. Before opening the ticket, the helpdesk guy could only suggest that I try degaussing. Sorry, been there, tried that. The only solution, other than ignoring it for half the day, is to fiddle with windows and wallpaper at the expense of time and efficiency. Or I can just take the day off and not deal with the monitor at all, I suppose.

Anyway, sometime this afternoon my problem will be solved.

I suppose I should move my sandwich then. Lately I've gotten into the habit of tossing my sandwich up on top of the back of the monitor (over the grilles) to warm it up and melt the cheese, in lieu of using the microwave. It gets a little bit dry, but it's still edible. Make of that what you will.

Despite the fact that we only had this conversation less than an hour ago I have already forgotten all but the gist and punchline of it.

The scene opens with a married couple and a couch. I am sitting down and my wife lifts up the blanket and sits on my legs. I shift myself, my book and my glasses sitting on my legs.

She apologizes, saying, "I'm sorry, I didn't see those there."

"What, did you think I'd taken them off and stowed them somewhere?" I reply, by way of a question, bemused.

She continued. "Well, sometimes you take them off and put them on something."

"They're removable?" I was intrigued. I looked down, puzzled about my apparent past of shelving my lower appendages. "My legs?" I asked.

It was only then that she told me, "I was talking about your glasses." Thereupon we laughed for quite some time.

Our cat, despite being rather quite old, is still active. She often runs around the house at thirty scale miles per hour (in my estimation, based on an entirely imagined sense of scale) completely on her own, but she does occasionally interact with us, too. Jessica's bought her a number of small toys that jingle and roll and things like that, except that the cat ignores them almost completely and they lay on the floor or elsewhere still and silent.

Except for when she's in a playful mood and we are in a cooperative one, and we throw the toys around the house for her. Were she a dog, she'd fetch them and bring them back to our feet with a wagging tail, and expectant puppy dog eyes, but she is a cat and as such just sprints to where it lands, or somewhere nearby.

I have a theory. It's not that she's too lazy to return it to us, it's that she isn't interested in it like that. I think she just wants to make sure it hits the ground, as though to find reassurance in the continued existence of gravity. As though if she weren't watching it, it might not land, and instead be floating somewhere.

The act of observation changes the data, after all. Schrodinger chose to use a cat for his uncertainty analogy, after all.

I'd think it silly except that every morning as I leave for work I pause in my driveway, watching the garage door close. If I haven't seen it stop at the bottom and I go off to work I get nagging doubts that I closed it at all and often end up turning back just to make sure I'd closed it.

I haven't forgotten to do so yet. Yet I worry and turn around.

You might think that to see it start closing would be enough, but it isn't. There was a day this summer when the door would go all the way down, hesitate and then go back up--repeatedly. There was no way to keep it closed short of interrupting it going upward with a quick tap of the button.

Despite the fact that it hasn't done this since, I still find the need to make sure that the door closes and stays closed. I can only wonder if I will ever be able to trust it, and in doing so, get back those half minutes every morning on my way to work.

It could be the fact that I never watched the show nor was I watching any cartoons in 1968 at all, but Wacky Races wasn't all that interesting. Perhaps if I had seen only two episodes a week for seventeen weeks, spread out over two years or so, instead of thirty-four episodes (actually, two so-called episodes comprise a half hour, but I'll get to that later) in under a week, then I might not be so un-enamored with the show, but whatever the reason it just didn't grab me.

It's so much of the same thing, over and over, oftentimes even the same cels pasted onto different backgrounds or the same gags slightly re-drawn. The announcer begins to grate quickly and the repetition moreso. Admittedly (again) the original audience watched a little bit a week, inbetween other cartoons, and not the entire series at once as I do with this DVD set, but even then I think it would've gotten old quickly.

Of course kids eat this kind of stuff up, I guess.

In a more grown-up sense, although admittedly about childish or at least mischevious adults, is Jeux D'Enfants (Love me if you dare) which Jessica and I just watched. Clearly sold and produced as an Amelie follower if not imitator, it matches the former film in whimsy and colorful palette if not quite the same playful and cute attitude that set Amelie so much apart.

This is, I think, a sad thing, as Jeux D'Enfants gains little from cranking up the color saturation quota. It's really a different movie, albiet with a little of the same ideas. To know that one film would not have been widely released if not for the success of the other is to realize that it is pocketbooks and not plotlines that dictate what we end up able to watch.

I wouldn't even be watching this if not for the fact that the trailer for it has been on every Paramount Classics DVD I've watched from Northfork on back. For that matter, I only watched Northfork because of the trailer for it that showed up on an earlier Paramount Classics DVD. Damn that DVD, whatever it was.

Orange County is the worst film I've seen this year, so far.

Well, I shouldn't say that it is that bad, but actually that I really did not enjoy it. I found Colin Hanks to be whiny and his friends and family unconvincing. When Jessica asked me if Tom Hanks (Colin's father) had pulled in some favors to get some of the bigger-ticket cameos, I couldn't but wonder if she was right. Then again, other than lending a couple chromosomes (but little acting ability) to his kid he didn't seem to have much otherwise to do with the film.

I was also struck by the appearance of Lily Tomlin in the movie. Not her performance, but by the way she seems to be looking more and more similar to Leonard Nimoy every day. I'm trying to figure out what sort of project would bring the two of them together, likely as mismatched siblings poking fun at each others' foibles or something like that. Or maybe they'd go for an opposites sort of thing and he'd be the zany, funny one and she'd be cold and logical. Hoo boy I can just smell the comedy with this idea.

Today as we were driving back from Jessica's Aunt & Uncle's place I was struck by something that I hadn't run across in quite some time: boredom. About two hours into the return trip I was completely and utterly bored of driving through northwest Ohio and thereabouts. The flooded roadways and fields and meadows and now-gigantic ponds just blended into the other lackluster scenery, all brown and dead and as devoid of life as they were of other things of interest.

Not helping matters was the fact that this was now the fourth time in eight days that I'd driven these flat and lonely roads. This time around most of the snow was gone and there weren't even any trains or deer or anything else to catch my attention. Most of the roadside stores were still closed, including the mechanic's shop with the sign about "managed by UFO enterprises" now abbreviated to just "UFO". Other sign zaniness that I passed at least four times would be the length of highway adopted by the H2O Church. I tried to look them up but only found some hip house of God based in Florida. The sort of place you can go to listen to Creed and their ilk.

I also noticed, every one of the eight times, that the Blanchard River crosses the highway twice.

Well, I suppose I noticed that seven times.

Moreover, Mobil or Speedway or whoever has painted the giant tank near Detroit that for so long was a baseball into a basketball. I'm not sure what to make of that.

Also, the photo La-Z-Boy on the north side of the Munroe La-Z-Boy sign is far too distorted, perspective-wise, to be "hip" or "edgy" and in fact it is just "cheesy".

Like I said... I was pretty bored. Which is strange for me, as I thought today. Lately I haven't gotten bored very often. There's always something, if not several things, between which I can choose, and it's not even the five channels with nothing on paradigm but several things I would like to do.

But when I'm driving three or four hours through the boring side of Ohio, well, my options get pretty limited.