New Environs
We are, by this point, mostly settled in to our new place in Portland, Maine. The town seems great. Its tiny size relative to Chicago is already coming through, as we run into people we’ve already met far too often when wandering around downtown. In a similar, but small world, remarkable coincidence, one of the landlords whose apartment we toured at first is dating an old friend of one of my close friends from college. And then we ran into them at the local pizza restaurant.
Today it snowed, but it feels like winter is letting go.. It has been warmer for the past week and none of the snow is sticking. I think it cracked the fifty degree mark a couple of days ago!
The job hunt continues…and once that is done, everything should be settled into place for a while. I think there will also be a lot of opportunities to juggle around here too.
Summer shows
Yesterday was the first of my shows for this season with Newton Learning, the education-y company I juggled for in the fall. They run after school programs, funded by No Child Left Behind, at schools that perform low enough on whatever standardized testing is the current..um..standard. Where last year all of the shows took place at school events around the start of the academic year, this time the company is reaching out early. I juggled yesterday at the Newton Learning booth at the Chicago Puerto Rican Children’s Parade. The actual folks running the booth were friendly, which was nice. It’s been a little awkward for me showing up at these things and meeting the people who are actually involved in the tutoring process, when I’m just the attention-getter hired to bring the kids and (hopefully) their parents to the booth. The people are never rude, so maybe it’s just me feeling awkward.
When I do these shows, Erica always teases me about how I’m an example of the way that funding for this huge educational drive gets funneled away from actual education. I suppose it’s true, and may be a tiny example of how the right wing Everything-Free-Market model can be counterproductive to what you’re actually trying to do: money goes to glitz and promotion and bright flashy colors instead of substance. On the flip side, of course, I’ve never seen the actual tutoring programs in action, and maybe they are really great. I certainly hope so. Heck, sometimes I even hope that the promotional funding must come from the company itself, and the government money is mandated to go directly to the tutoring programs. And, while this system is in place, I don’t mind doing these shows and hoping that my flashiness actually does help steer some kid towards tutoring and, I hope, an improved education who might not otherwise have signed up. At least, that’s how I’m justifying doing these shows. Besides, they’re fun.
Estrogen Fest happened a couple of weeks ago. I think our two nights went quite well, although I felt slightly better about my performance on the second night. There was videotaping going on, and my understanding is that we will get a copy once everything is put together.. Stay tuned.
The Secret Crapola
I finally got around to watching The Secret this week, with Erica and Kate. I first learned about it through a coworker, and then some months later read up on it as Oprah started endorsing the damn thing. Now, there are many, many, critiques out there already, and I don’t really plan on attacking the whole thing. It is rich with material for fisking. Leave us say that I think The Secret is at best irresponsible, and, much more likely, a cynical attempt to make money off of people when they are at their most desperate. Oprah’s endorsement lends it an undeserved air of credibility, and has helped push it up the bestseller lists.
What stood out as I watched, and I think deserves some comment, is one particular testimony from one of the “medical” talking heads on the program. He had just finished suggesting that people use the Secret to improve their health, delicately attempting to prevent future lawsuits by encouraging people to, of course, rely on traditional medical help for serious illness, but to turn their minds to exploring other paths at the same time. He then went on to describe how sometimes, doctors have given patients a sugar pill, telling them it was medication. Lo and behold, these patients healed just as quickly as those on actual medication, if not quicker! And this, he tells us, is the Secret.
Now, disregarding his likely skewing of any actual data on such studies, this man has just come out and all but stated that the Secret is nothing more than a placebo effect. A placebo effect! The Secret is just a sugar pill you can take, and tell yourself that you feel better. I’m surprised they included that, for I would have thought it a bit of a giveaway that this snake oil they’re hawking might not actually do much.
Lame and Cool at the same time..
So I still haven’t figured out embedding video in this WordPress thing… Lame. Erica and I put up a couple of videos of ourselves on YouTube, though, which I think is pretty cool. Still lame that I don’t have the videos sitting nicely in the middle of this post.
So here is the bit Erica and I did for Girlie Q in August. We’re planning to keep developing it and performing it elsewhere.
And here is Bruce and me passing eleven balls. I’ve had it for a while and been meaning to put it up.. Bruce does a fancy kick after we mess up!
That’ll be all the videos for now.
Oh..I’m also lame because I didn’t log on here for so long and thus missed moderating Mark’s comment on the last entry.. Sorry Mark!
Ten Years of Winter
I always very much enjoy the start of winter in the midwest. Back at the end of high school, whenever I told anyone that I was considering attending college in Iowa, the first word out of their mouth would always be either “Why?” or “Cold!” It became pretty hyped up in my mind, and I had some trepidation that first year…would I be able to handle the Iowa winter?
Well it worked out fine. I loved the snow, the cold did not bother me, and I grew to like it more over time. It also became somewhat symbolic each year, as the weather turned from the familiar to something I had never encountered back in Austin, of moving away from home or even growing up. The temperature drops and I am reminded that I’m kind of an adult now, on my own in a new, or at least after these years different, place, and it’s in a way reassuring.
And I still have to go outside to see the first snowfall of the season, each year.
Pals
So the other day Erica and I were walking out of the apartment, when she paused to look through the mailbox. I stood on the steps, heard a noise from the tree directly in front of me. I turned to look just in time to see a bird of prey (hawk?� our guess..) come flying out of the tree towards me, holding a dead pigeon. It veered off, landed on an suv half a block away, and dropped the bird. We investigated, the hawk flew up to a building top, and we had a quick look at the pigeon. All of its neck feathers were removed, leaving a strange skinny bit between shoulders and head. We moved off quickly, and when we returned later in the evening, pigeon and hawk were gone. A bit of wildlife in the city…it colored my whole day…
So about two years ago I decided that I wanted to write palindromes. Off and on I work on it..rarely making much progress. I haven’t been able to make any long ones that make sense. Here are my best so far. If you’ve heard them already, let me know. sigh.
Drowsy sword
No parts strap on
Amoral aroma
God for evil onsets at ten; net tastes no liver of dog
Something of an Anthem
So Weird Al has a new cd coming out in two days.. I’ve been enjoying and sharing his latest music video as I wait to rush out and make my purchase…it’s great! An excellent parody of Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty” song…. Enjoy!
In fact..September seems to be a big media month for me.. Scott Mccloud has a new book out, Making Comics. I already picked it up and am in the middle of my second reading. Excellent stuff.. A comic about the craft and techniques involved in making sequential art.
And then, there’s the new Jet Li movie, Fearless. I’m hoping to catch it either this afternoon or tomorrow evening. Very excited..whenever Jet Li works with Yuen Wo Ping for fight choreography, I rest assured that the results will be very impressive.
Leadership
I meant to blog about this in March, and never got around to it. Now I’m all nervous after my last post! Anyway.. A couple of months ago I was trucking along as usual, when I came a cross a link on one of my favorite blogs to a story about this. The link goes to a current story, but I only heard one kernel of it back in March..It’s about the South Dakota abortion ban that’s coming through the works now. The chief of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota said that if the abortion ban goes into effect, she will have an abortion clinic opened on tribal land. In the state boundaries, but outside state jurisdiction. I was in awe..here, finally, was a leader taking a strong and brave stand on something important! She was in a unique position, and used it to stand up for women’s reproductive rights while thumbing her nose at the state government. This was no photo-op-based maverick macho posturing, but the real thing..
Now, there are movements fighting the abortion ban every step of the way, and maybe the challenges will work, and/or maybe a court will strike the ban down… But I remember what it felt like to read her words..and to see someone with the power and the capability to stand up to the anti-choice movement actually doing so, straightforward and unabashedly saying NO. And I think I had a taste of what an actual leader does.
Frightening about my hometown
So it turns out that the Chtorr really are attacking. This mystery disease eerily reminds me of parts from that sci fi saga about aliens invading the earth first with their ecology… slowly turning the planet hospitable to them and in the process giving us horrible plagues and true ecological warfare. Yikes.
And Austin is a city with one of the highest rates of infection. Double yikes.
*Update*
So my mother took it upon herself to fact check this fantastical little story, and it seems, indeed, too out there to be true. Sorry y’all..I just wasn’t skeptical enough… Most likely delusions on the part of people involved, with maybe a little hoax mixed in on someone’s part. She sent a link to this discussion board with some relevant comments..scroll through..halfway down or so some medical research folk pop in.. As an added bonus, we now know that I have a crack fact checking team backing this website up- my mom and, um, whoever else helps out!
Garfield, Made Good Again
When I was ten I thought Garfield was a great comic strip. Then, over the years, I watched it slowly degenerate around the same two jokes it always told.. (Or maybe as I grew older I simply noticed this. Exept I remember old Garfield strips that carried a storyline over a series of days..strips that actually involved changes of setting, pace, and activity.) Well I recently came across this forum where someone had taken old Garfield strips and removed all of the cat’s dialogue, creating a series of strips about a rather sad man talking to his cat.. It even becomes almost poignant at times! Well, apparently this has been done before with Garfield, and was taken down after some litiginous correspondence from PAWS inc. So check these out before they disappear..the manage to add quality to an otherwise soulless strip…
