Wednesday, March 31, 2004

details

So I’m off work this morning, trying to ferret out a computer virus that has bested the bestest minds Puget Sound has to offer, and I’m not making much headway but as a “test” (heh) I decided to get on line and try to upload an image - to see how slow the computer was to respond, don’t you know, and whether I got fatally spammed in the interim.  So far, pretty good!  Meantime I seem to have uploaded a few images from a recent trip to the conservatory that I can share with you.  Let’s see:
This is a utility pole near my house - 10th and Balboa, I believe.  The original is about four times bigger. 

This is one of those flowery things that clog up the works in the conservatory.  Once again, I cropped this down and reduced the size but the original is much bigger. 

I got a few other decent shots while I was wandering around that day, and I’m slowly learning some of the tricks I can do - more slowly than I’d like, with the computer woes I’ve been having.  (dang but I may have gotten it this time - ten minutes on line with only one popup?  COULD I BE THIS GOOD?  Answer: no, probably not.  The flood is building behind the rickety old dam and I’ll be fighting the deluge again soon I’m sure.) Anyway, enough pictures for now, but it did occur to me as I was walking around with my camera slung insouciantly over a shoulder, the watchpocket of my levis abulging with my tidy little cellphone, wishing idly for an iPod (soon, soon, my pet), that I’m addicted to digital bling.  There’s a shop on my commute to work called Mr. Bling Bling that does up shiny choppers, but that’s not really my style.  However, I wouldn’t mind turning a few heads on the bus with several thousand gigabytes of digital capacity that would make me into some sort of cybernetically omnipotent datalord.  See this is what happens when I think I fixed my computer.  Time to log off again before my bubble is burst, or worse yet, I become even more monomaniacal.

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

The Limits of Friendship

He was my director at the JCC in my first real play.  He continued to lead me in two or three improv classes after that.  When the JCC put a theater unit into their summer camp up at Barton Flats, he was both my director and my counselor.  His cabin - all of us actors together - grew more close-knit than my family, so close that we had reunions at Disneyland for two years afterwards.  He might have been as old as his early 20s, rotund and falstaffian, a bowling ball with thick stubby pins for arms and legs; and he was fast, as fast as the fastest sprinter at my high school - I know because I saw them race twice to a tie at Barton Flats.  My point is, he was exactly the guy I wanted as a friend.  I was proud to call him one.

Monday, March 29, 2004

One More Reason I Don’t Gamble

The news story was on early, I only listened with half an ear.  It seems that people were getting sick at casinos.  They interviewed a British-sounding woman who spoke as if she were holding a lit candle in her mouth; she described the mechanism of contagion, saying that we should imagine someone in the gambling parlor suddenly needing to rush to the facilities for purposes of self-evacuation.  (She said this a bit more graphically, actually, but women with a British accent can say words like “diarrhea” and it still sounds classy, while I use a word like “evacuate” and people in other time zones feel like they have to take a shower.)

SO: they’re in the facilities, “facilitating,” and then they return to the gaming rooms without having taken the trouble thoroughly to cleanse themselves.  The scenario the British woman painted concerned people trotting back and forth from the slot machines to the bathrooms, moving from one soiled one-armed bandit to the next, exchanging new varieties of coliform bacteria with every handle they pull. 

But really, British lady, that’s not the most significant way to spread disease in a casino and you know it.  Even in my somnolent state I knew that, in a casino, there is one place where everybody gets their hands into the pot together, where chips and dice are shared and fondled by indiscriminate groups, where folk stand around a pit and rub everything inside of it with eager sweaty fingers.  That’s where the intenstinal distress is most likely to originate and spread, but I bet that the sophisticated demure English woman knew, without even trying, that she couldn’t mention the craps table on air without cracking up.