fine whine

Today I thought I stumbled across a brilliant idea. While killing some time this afternoon (more on this later) I sifted through the shelf-full of gadgets in the front of our house, idly picking up Jessica's step-counter with belt clip. At that moment I thought of another belt-clipped gadget, the Ericsson LX588 cell phone I've taken to carrying at least until SBC beats CoreComm up and installs our phone service. Why not, I wondered, combine the two devices and for once actually cram a new feature into cell phones to replace a gadget that people already have on their belts?

Well aware of the lack of original ideas these days, I did a quick Google search for "cell phone pedometer" and in fact turned up this this posting on whynot.net. Oh well. It's still a good idea, I just was beaten to it by at least four months.

So as I mentioned, I was killing time. Sometime between last evening and the night whilst the temperature was dropping some twenty-odd degrees a transformer in our furnace decided to shuffle its coils off their, er, mortal coils and burn out silently, leaving us, as it did, with no heat on the coldest night in May. My feeble, half awake attempts to flip all switches and trip all breakers was to no avail, and I had to break down and call up the HomeGard folks who have our home warranty. We called out All-Knight Heating, and after two hours of banging around in the basement and garage the repairman had replaced the dead transformer, installed a fuse inline, and took down my credit card information to pay the $100 deductible that I'd forgotten about. Not only had I forgotten the deductible, but I also failed to ask the guy where in the circuit the transformer had been, namely so I could figure out why none of the four breakers involved tripped instead of the transformer being fried. You know, since I had all those otherwise-wasted hours of circuit analysis in college... as if I were going to bust out some calculus on his ass. Now that's cold.

I may just be giving up too soon, but I cannot seem to find to find the origin of the phrase "on the up and up" anywhere on the known web (by which I mean several Google searches came up with nothing). Anybody have some obscure knowledge I don't? I need no definitions, just origins.

'Twas a warm day here.
We ate lunch at Panera
and thought about names.

As I was doping my (freshly-brewed) iced tea today with my secret blend of sugar and Equal, a thought struck me. What would be the most foolproof name to give the counter-people to call when the food is ready, I wondered. For some reason "Truman" came to my head, and upon giving it more thought now, I conclude that's it a pretty good one, both for clarity of spelling and pronunciation as well as potential for uniqueness. Moreover it is suitable for both first and last name, and it strikes me as something Jack Reacher would do in the books by Lee Childs (if he hasn't already).

Not one to leave such questions answered so quickly or easily, and looking to steer the dining conversation away from heightened cholesterol and other maladies, I posed it to my wife and parents, and we had a decent discussion about which name would in fact be best, if any.

We were, after all, a table full of Lietzes, not an easy tame to spell nor read. I've relegated myself to giving the name "Mike" instead of my last at restaurants and the like, and I had overheard my dad doing the same for this one. He suggested the use of more esoteric names like Alfred and then moved on to hip-hop nicknames ("P. Diddy, party of 1, your table is ready"). My mom chimed in with some more nicknames, and Jessica took the ball and ran with the whole idea of using stereotypically ethnic names for us WASP types.

A further suggestion, one that merits some further consideration, was the use of common object names, such as "houseboat" and "stick" and so on. This may well have been the sort of thinking that lead to the naming of heavies in Neil Gaiman's fantastic American gods, but one can never be too sure.

But "houseboat" has a nice ring to it. A lot better one than "Long feet", which could well be my Native American name, would have.

Is there a way to write an original story about kidnapping? Inquiring minds need to know.

I'm watching The way of the gun again and trying to figure out if there's a way to put a new wrinkle on the whole kidnapping genre. Or at least a different one.

Any future we have now will be its future's past.

That line just came to me, bringing with it a rhythm as though detached otherwise intact from a song or chant. Whatever that means. I'd meant to write about The Future for this entry but find myself needing to address the past. Namely, 1997, the year that Donnie Brasco premiered, just before the month of March. I was in High school then, wrapping up what was a pretty decent senior year, complete with angst-y relationships and college decisions. The extent of my exposure to sophisticated film culture was a fanatical devotion to all things Monty Python and the knowledge that a number of movies about The Godfather had been made and I should probably see them. The idea of DVDs had not occurred to me, let alone laserdiscs, and I owned a mere hundred and twenty CDs. And I missed Donnie Brasco completely—had no clue it had come out or anything like that. I probably knew only of The empire strikes back's special edition which also played that weekend. Knowing this really only helps me in my personal quest to determine exactly when the current version of my personality solidified, and it bears no meaning on the rest of you or the rest of this entry.

As I mentioned, I was thinking about the future recently. Wasting two dollars on an old widescreen laserdisc of Demolition man I watched the movie in all its letterboxed glory, and I can't say I was any more excited or disappointed from the last time I watched it, even with the additional visuals. I want to like that movie because the ideas underlying it (at least on the futurist side, not the meatheaded action) are pretty interesting and some even original. What gets me, though, is that all of the doors open themselves. Is energy so abundant that they can spare power to open every door, every time? Clearly we're not dealing with non-renewable resources here; though nobody ever mentions what makes San Angeles tick. Likewise the city in Blade runner and scads of other near future visions. I'd like to think that the future lies in clean nuclear power, but I doubt most filmmakers share my optimism. Is it so rare to find a Gene Roddenberry, who, in the course of creating a virtually completely original periodic table, invented a vastly powerful new power source such that ships hurtling through space would not only have doors that opened themselves but artificial gravity to boot? Lucas tackled the problem pretty feebly by mentioning power converters and widget generators and never showing how they work, though I am sure that in the books or comics the engineering is explained in great detail. I just don't read those books, sorry.

What books I do read are pretty varied. I'm working my way through Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn and it thoroughly impresses me. Not since The curious incident of the dog in the night-time have I read a book so convincingly portraying a detective with a disorder, this time Tourette's syndrome. Of course all that I know about Tourette's is that which I've seen on TV, but the tics and compulsions as he presents them certainly have the ring of authenticity if not outright truth. Lethem's Gun, with occasional music was one of the best books I read last year and though this one's subject matter and setting differ, the hooks still pull me in just as much.

And I'd just like to settle the coolest house cat name debate now with Lethem's mention of a feline named Shelf.

In an odd turn of events, I just noticed that my toothpaste tube has a cap that can both be flipped open and screwed off. I know this only because it says so in little letters right on it. My only question is, "Why?"

I lied. I have more questions:

• Are there people out there so dedicated to flipping or screwing?
• Would these people rule out a potential toothpaste just because it has the wrong type of cap?
• Are there people out there who need to be told how to use the cap of a toothpaste tube?
• Where are these people and can I sell them things?

And in other news, I made it through the library's entire stock of Transmetropolitan, and enjoyed it thoroughly. My forays into graphic novels have been somewhat limited, but this time around Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson really impressed me. It's funny, it's witty and intelligent, and ultimately optimistic for the future. Sure, Ellis paints a pretty oppressive picture of The City and its downtrodden inhabitants, but also reveals that they are somewhat avid readers, and also that acid rain has been eliminated entirely. Not too bad, really, when one thinks about it.

My personal vision for the future (at least one that I'd try to write into a poor imitation of Blade runner) is of illiterates who rely entirely on spoken and pictorial communication. This is not a new idea, though the way I envision it happening is new and edgy: Say the media producers of the world are really trying to capture the youth and 18-24 year old male markets. They shrewdly turn to the video game industry, whose designers and artists have long littered visual displays and scenery with pseudo-language gibberish. Broadcasted video is littered with these meaningless hieroglyphics interspersed with real information but to a varying degree until the real information is wiped off the screen and only the gibberish remains. It looks cool, though, and without needing it to watch TV nobody gets around to learning how to read, since books have long since been replaced by video media. Of course the e-book makes an appearance, but only as a stepping stone to having some dullard just read the damn thing out loud. Surprisingly, nobody complains.

Anyway, while you can still read, pick up some volumes of Transmetropolitan. And if you notice some recurrent graffiti, say, "FREE STEVE CHUNG", you can search the internet to find out what it means. At least, I did.

And speaking of revelations, apparently the proper term for screwing off the cap of a toothpaste tube is "twisting". So now you know.