fine whine

For as much practice as the cast of Six feet under had doing it, I think at least half the cast still had trouble convincingly crying even in the show’s final season. Or maybe it was me laughing that made their sobs seem so fake.

The show’s creators wisely stopped the show after five years, likely fearing the prospects of further catastrophes to heap upon the poor Fishers (and friends). I certainly can’t think of many more trials and tribulations they could experience. The writers of the DVD menu summaries cleverly covered many of this season’s surprises, but the show’s writers could’ve done them a favor and left some out.

On a technical level the show is quite good. The cinematography features lots of good composition and great shots*. Too bad the plot and characters detract and distract the viewer from noticing.

So why did I watch it? This isn’t the sort of ’so-bad-it’s-good’ fare that would normally attract me. Well, it wasn’t always ’so-bad’. The show’s first season is quite good, and inconsistent in tone with the res tof the series. Almost every episode of every season begins with a death and fades to white, but only the shows of the first season also featured semi-parodic commercials for mortuary products that were easily worthy of some of SNL’s efforts.

In almost all of the early shows the characters find themselves talking to the dead, and early on it’s cleverly done. Later on, one episode in five does the same thing and somehow almost always lacks the same punch as before.

Am I sorry I watched the latter four seasons? I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. The series last few episodes and finale were highly-discussed on the ‘net, and to have missed them left me feeling a little excluded.

That said, I still haven’t seen most of the last season of The X-files, and there’s a show I enjoyed wholeheartedly for most of several seasons.

Six feet under started out better than many shows, and ended well and appropriately, but I’d like to see more of the sort of effort that went into the very last 15 minutes than the couple thousand that preceded them.

* and many not-so-great ones. For some reason, at least this season, there are a lot of shots of coversations with bright backlighting, giving the impression that the characters are glowing or have halos. And that they’re badly, unnaturally lit.

The weather this summer has been great for weeds*, and not so great for grass. Our front and back yards were pretty patchy before, but the dead spots keep appearing and, well, growing. I’ve bought two bags now of grass seed and even tried out the special mix with the blue mulch mixed in, and the grass still looks pretty bad. The spray-on weed & feed I used had much better results than the dry stuff I’d spread before, and I think I’ll henceforth be buying the liquid instead, since it actually seemed to do something. But that was one minor success among a long string of failures.

Everytime I mow the grass with my cordless electric mower, the blade of which I sharpened today for the first time with a brand-new file, I can’t help but think that such a nice piece of grass-cutting technology deserves better grass to be cutting. Even our push mowers far outclas the grass they (ably) cut. I’d find it more appropriate to be mowing with an old gas-and-oil belching mower that’s all rusted, and perhaps missing a wheel.

On the other hand, it would be really fun (and likely noisy) to try out a riding mower. And it would be overkill, though that doesn’t stop the guy who is paid to mow several lawns on my street with his rotating assortment of ride-on mowers. I’d like to ask him to do ours sometime just to see how much he’d laugh, except that his mowers are so loud he’d probably not hear me.

* This year’s weed crop doesn’t include poison ivy, surprisingly and thankfully. I’ve killed two plants and seen no others. This is fine with me.

I haven’t been to Cedar Point in a year. The only time I go anymore, despite its being a relatively easy two-hour drive north, has been the annual company family day at the park.

It was a hot sunny day in the park, and I found myself glad to have grabbed a hat at the last minute. Years ago a friend of ours had lost a bucket hat on the Mean Streak, and while I was leery of wearing the one hat I own (that I’m comfortable wearing) to the park, I’m glad I did. I may have looked strange constantly flipping the brim to the back, but it kept the sun off my neck and face and left me with no sunburn.

Having mentioned the Mean Streak, I’d like to point out that it’s still the best wooden roller coaster I’ve ever ridden, and holds its own against many of its metal brothers in the park. What I noticed this year for the first time is that it has an amazing view of the park (situated northernmost as it is) that I someday must somehow take a picture of it. I did have a cheapie disposable (film) camera and took a surreptitious shot here and there that I’ll probably develop in a year or two, but I doubt many came out well. I wasn’t at the park to take pictures anyway; I was there to have fun.

Which I did. I rode many of the big-ticket attractions, and even some of the less-popular ones. Since they add one major attraction every year, some of the older ones lose their luster even though they’re still solid rides. Immediately the Magnum XL-2000 comes to mind.

In any other park, one that doesn’t have Magnum Force and the Raptor, the Magnum XL-2000 (what a stupid name. Didn’t they realize it would stand for more than a year?) would easily be the best ‘coaster in the park. It was, at one time, the fastest and tallest in the world. Just because it doesn’t hold the top honors anymore doesn’t mean it’s any slower or shorter.

And the lap bars are so much more forgiving than the newer coasters. Not that I need extra space; I like to have it loose so I can (nearly) stand up atop that tall hill. Few thrills match the pause between the front reaching the apex of the hill and when the back, just before the train hurtles everybody back groundward. It’s the perfect moment for a ‘V for Victory’ or ‘Invincible!’ (or even ‘I am not a crook’) yell, arms thrust skyward. Trust me, and try it at your own peril.

Even less popular than the Magnum is the Gemini. The Gemini can’t compare for height, or speed, or much else except for the fact that it’s a fun ride. I don’t know how many other double coasters there are in the world, let alone ones on which the operators sometimes run a train backward, but this one’s worth it. The line’s always short, and even choosy people can be in any seat they want in under fifteen minutes. I’ve seen more people running straight from the exit back into the entrance on that ride than any other. Not bad for one that only reaches a height of 125 feet and speeds no faster than 60 mph.

Oddly enough it is those very same numbers they mention in the pre-launch routine on their newest ride, the SkyHawk, though the riders of the Gemini aren’t facing almost straight down when it happens. SkyHawk is a giant swing, and the ride’s over much more quickly, and yet the line was easily five times longer than the Gemini’s. It’s newest, and the operators were only running one of the two arms, but for the wait the ride wasn’t all that great. In a few years, when the hype has died back down and fewer people ride it, it might be a worthwhile thing to do, but until then I think I’ll stick to the coasters.

Speaking of the line for the SkyHawk, though, I was forced to do something I’ve never done before: snitch on fellow riders. After about half an hour of waiting thee teenage boys climbed under the railing to join a sullen and lonely girl a few people ahead of me. She was happy to see them, but the couple next to me and the youngish frat boys/Abercrombie customers weren’t so pleased to see the kids. We spent the remaining ten or twelve minutes of waiting giving each other suspicious, telling glances, or discussing the kids, deciding that “somebody” should “do something” about it.

When the time came to stand on the circles for the seats, the three boys bounced ahead like they’d done nothing wrong, and it wasn’t until I tapped the line attendant and pointed out that they were, in fact, evil line-jumpers before anything could happen. Signs all over the park point out that line-jumpers will get tossed out, but I’d never seen it actually done. Having fingered the guilty parties, I looked away to avoid (presumably) their withering stares, as they were led out of the ride. I don’t actually know if they were ejected from the park (for them to use that term makes me laugh, since Cedar Point has no shortage of rides that could easily launch a normal-sized adult well over the fence and into the parking lot) or merely the ride, but when the people around them thanked me I felt a tad bit better. I was the bad guy to the kids, but a minor hero for the rest of the people around me. All was soon forgotten in the last few minutes of waiting, as the frat boys were admonished by the dad of a youngish girl near them to keep their hands off his daughter. This became a running joke for the couple-minute runtime of the ride, and before long I didn’t feel too bad about the three rule-breakers. Sadly no employees had seen them cut, but it would seem that few people would ever get thrown out if customer witnesses aren’t enough.

Not an hour later, though, while I was standing in line for the Bobcat (a pint-sized coaster distinguishable for having a single-car “train” more than anything else) three people again jumped the line in front of me. They weren’t even kids, but unattractive, smelly adults, and the woman behind me only grunted when she saw it happen. She didn’t even shrug, and without backup from her I wouldn’t be able to get this trio in trouble. So I let them ride, and thought almost nothing of it thereafter. I had bigger fish to fry, like scaring the small children that the operator put in the seat in front of me, the ones who quickly converted from “I’m scared!” to “Let’s ride it again!” though they were on their own for the return trip - one ride on the Bobcat is enough for me for each visit to the park.

So should I have snitched on the grownups, for skipping ten or fifteen minutes of a line? It’s against the policy to skip any line, but hey, it’s just the Bobcat. Punsihment for jumping that line should be less severe, like making them stand in line instead for the Iron Dragon* or something.

* The Iron Dragon is, to my knowledge, the only coaster in the park that spends more time going uphill than down, though I wasn’t able to time the Top Thrill Dragster. That’d be a close call. I’m not saying the Iron Dragon’s not a passable ride, just that riders spend more time on the clack-clack-clack uphill portions of track than anything else. This was the first visit wherein I did not ride the Iron Dragon at least once.

In college I took a geography class taught by the then-editor of Goode’s World Atlas, John Hudson. Though a good teacher, he was also pragmatic and understood that, to reach more than just the interested third of his students (and in particular, the ones sitting up in the balcony tossing back a few cold ones), he’d need to spike his slideshows with interesting and funny slides. This he did, showing us amusing sights and signs from all over the continent, all the while attempting to teach us all about the geography of North America.

While I remember less than I should of the material (to this day I can’t recall where durum is grown, and if it is in fact used in the making noodles or something else) I do remember a few of the photos. I’m pretty sure he didn’t have this one, for when we discussed the midwest, but it would’ve been among his collection. If you click on the photo above* you’ll see why I took the shot.

Or you can look here:

It truly boggles the mind, this “Nameless Creek”. It’s something of a logical fallacy, along the lines of “This statement is false” or some such.

* The photos above are hosted by Zooomr, and I have posted them because they are giving free “pro” accounts, with additional privileges I do not know, to bloggers and people like me. Thanks Andy for the heads up. I’m a pathological joiner of anything free, so it was a given I’d try this site out. Can it compete with flickr? Only time will tell.

Last night* and today Jessica and I were in Ohio’s Holmes county.

We haven’t gone on all that many trips together, which probably makes it all the more difficult to figure out what to do. Holmes County is smack dab in the middle of Ohio’s so-called Amish country, home to a great concentration of the technologically-averse-but-tourist-friendly folk.

There’s not all that much to actually do there, though, if you’re not interested in shopping for bespoke stuff or antiques. I was reminded of another weekend trip we’d taken to somewhere in southern Ohio, again largely existing because of the old stuff trade.

The line from the title, though, was something I’d said after Jessica pointed out that a particular non-antiques store smelled pleasant. We’d been in an antiques barn not long before, and it didn’t take much imagination to see the newly-created knicknacks (well, all except for the ‘hand-made’ PVC marshmallow guns) in a few decades being hawked again as antiques. After all, an antique’s just something that’s lasted a long time.

But as for shopping for them, it’s not really my thing. I find some moments of amusement in how things looked so long ago, with the toys and keepsakes that are dangerous, offensive or just dull, and just the things that people have found fit to preserve over the ages. But only for a little while, and then soon the novelty wears off, and I’m just looking at other people’s clutter. Really, that’s what a lot of antiques are: clutter plus time.

I have a messy room just waiting for the day that everything becomes a priceless relic. It could well take me that long to get it cleaned up, anyway.

* Though we were in the heart of Ohio’s Amish country, our hotel had an internet-connected computer in the lobby (and free wireless connectivity that I had no laptop to access). That said, I didn’t feel like updating the site from there. Of course, it would be something to say that I drove a hundred miles just to write a post…

For a company that deals in communications, AT&T doesn’t seem too interested in hooking me up.

Sure, sure I’ve got my local service, stripped down to its barest minimum (I don’t even have CallerID anymore), but that’s about the extent of what AT&T can offer me, except for more long distance calling plans than I could ever want or need.

I’m not interested in connecting myself beyond what I have now; I’m interested in what they should be able to do for my computer.

Every so often (i.e. twice a week) lately I’ve been receiving a flyer for what seems to be a good deal for DSL, under fifteen bucks a month. This sounds like a good deal to me, and I know that even the slowest DSL would be a ten or hundredfold improvement over the crappy dialup I’ve got now.

Yes, I still use a modem to dial into my internet service.

Some 80% (or more) of American households have broadband access, and I don’t. I’m not holding out on principle, I just can’t get reasonably priced highspeed internet, and I’m not willing to pay too much.

‘Too much’ being my only options: Cable from Time Warner, by way of the reseller Insight who, nearest I can tell, can count only the increased price as added-value. Time Warner doesn’t service my neighborhood directly. Comcast doesn’t know I exist, nor do any of the other smaller cable providers, except WOW! which wants me to give them three dollars a day before taxes, though for that I’d get cable TV and local phone service.

Surprisingly, ISDN is available, but not at the price a decades-old technology should cost now. I’d jump on the satellite internet bandwagon before I’d get my house wired with ISDN.

But those aren’t the offers AT&T enticingly dangles in front of me twice a week. They’re ostensibly offering me a DSL connection for less than I pay for my local phone service.

Except for one thing: it’s not available in my neighborhood.

One of these days I intend to map out exactly the blacked out area outside the reach of their connection offices. Since they own the wires (or tubes, as some would say), and they haven’t wired close enough to me, I can’t get connected.

For the last three years I’ve been checking to see if they build an office close enough to me to finally cast off the shackles of bad dialup. For three years they’ve given me a runaround about not being able to share their expansion plans, and for three years they haven’t expanded to include my neighborhood.

I don’t live in the boonies, or anything like that. My house is well within the outerbelt of the city, and less than 15 miles from downtown. I’ve tried to explain this to the patient, but useless, people at AT&T to no avail.

Recently though I’ve gotten more fed up. I called them back and gave them an earful about constantly getting these stupid offers in the mail for a service they cannot provide me. I berated them for knowing where I live, what they can offer me, and sending me junk mail offers that I couldn’t use if I tried.

They’ve got my address in a database, to know that I can’t get DSL. Why don’t they link that database to the junk mail system?

Could they really be so stupid as to not think that anybody in the city is outside their tentacled reach? Or do they just not care?

I told the specialist on the phone that I wanted to save them postage, but really, I just don’t want to see the offers. She said I’d be removed from the mailing list, though this really does little to allay my annoyance.

This doesn’t even count as a tiny victory. There’s still nothing I can do to get connected - nobody in my neighborhood is sharing their overpriced access (I only know of one person with broadband, and I’d feel bad about saturating her connection with my gaming and downloads) and no free wireless is nearby. What does it take, in this day and age, to get a reasonable connection?

Other than suggesting their own overpriced dialup, AT&T gave me only one other option*: get everybody in my neighborhood to ‘order’ this access we can’t get, to somehow show them that there is, in fact, an interest.

Too bad I need everybody’s phone number to put in orders, and that’s the one thing that I can’t seem to find in the public records. What am I supposed to do, walk up to their doors and ask them in person? I can’t even call them.

* They didn’t suggest that I move, but I suppose that would be an option except that they really, really dropped the ball on even my stripped down local service the last time I moved.

Last week I wrote about writing more. Until today, though, nothing new appeared.

Well, it’s not entirely my fault.

Sometime last week a number of my files disappeared, and tech support took a little while to restore them and give me a vague explanation as to where they’d gone and why.

Basically, they don’t know, and I don’t really care - I’m happy as long as they’re back. I did, however, lose two days*, and I’m slowly patching things back together. My “I’ve watched” list was probably hit the hardest.

So scroll down - there’s more to read, finally.

* I am, of course, backing everything up today for the first time in a few months. If you don’t already make regular backups of your data, whatever it may be, well, you’re in for a surprise someday. An unpleasant one.

For the first time since September of last year, Jessica and I played Yahtzee (which a few people know as Yacht, or poker dice*) tonight.

We played six games, and I ended up beating her by a couple hundred points. A couple hundred points isn’t really that much in light of how many games we’ve played (more numbers here), but as long as I’m keeping track I’ll take the little victories where I find them.

After all, she got not one but two Yahtzee bonuses. I cannot understand why she gets more Yahtzees (5 of the same number, for the uninitiated) than I do, unless my slightly more conservative playing style is to blame.

That we are under a thousand points apart after 216 games is probably statistically insignificant (seems to be a little over 1% of either of our totals), but I don’t recall anything from the classes I’ve taken and books I’ve read concerning statistics.

I do, however, remember some more elementary concepts, and was pleased to notice that, for all six games, my ‘Chance’ score (sum total of all 5 dice, something of a catch-all or gimme) had the same median, mean and mode.

Mean is what everybody knows as the average. Median is merely midway between the highest and lowest, and mode is the most-occurring. The latter two have always struck me as useless, and that’s probably why they popped up today.

The ‘math’ was easy, after all - four of them were 24, and the other two a 23 and a 25. Less interesting, though much more important, was the fact that each time I managed to get the bonus 35 points for rolling enough of each number. That, combined with an uncharacteristic three Yahtzees, is probably what kept all of my scores today above average.

Whatever the case, we had fun. And in the end, that’s all that matters, as long as I’m winning.

* Having recently re-discovered the origin of the “dead man’s hand” I wondered if there was a corresponding roll in Yahtzee. The fact that the die faces don’t directly map to the cards (aces and eights), combined with the fact that nobody has ever died playing Yahtzee (at least I found none in my twelve minutes of research), means that the “dead man’s roll” will likely remain a mystery for some time.