Category: Out there

Before Unix security class last night, waiting for dinner in a fast-food joint, a middle-aged man with an embarrassing pony tail and army boots is striding toward the counter, cramming bites of cheeseburger into his mouth as fast as he can. By the time he gets the attention of an employee, he’s eaten half the burger. He thrust the remains out at arm’s length, in the face of the unfortunate worker. Mouth half-full of food, he barked: “No cheese! Just a Jumbo Jack, no onions, no cheese. Just a plain Jumbo Jack!” The worker stared at him, said nothing, gave him one.

As J.R. Bob Dobbs said, “Don’t just eat a hamburger. Eat the hell out of it.” Somehow I don’t think this is what he meant.

People.

Just recv’d one of ThinkGeek‘s occasional email newsletters, with an unusually squinchy lede:

Welcome to the January newsletter where we sadly announce that the Year Of The Monkey is about (on 2/9) to be superceded by the Year Of The Rooster (or the year of the Green Chicken if you use the Five-Element Systems). Oh joy. Nothing funnier than a green chicken. In better news, it’s going to be the year 4702 in China so they’ve probably already engineered time travel. Perhaps they can go back in time and change 2005 to the Year Of The Jedi. Patience we must have…

Well, I do use the Five Element system, but why exactly is it the Year of the Green Chicken? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t quite as surreal as I had hoped. But still sounds auspicious to me. Happy Green Chicken, everyone.

Interesting case of 3rd-level irony: In Longview, Washington, a school had a “Make your own T-shirt day.” One openly gay student took a lime-green tee, drew rainbows on it with magic marker, and inscribed the chest with the words “Too gay to function” (apparently lifted from the movie “Mean Girls”). The school sent him home for inappropriate dress, claiming the shirt was offensive to homosexuals. So credit is due to the school for being concerned about expression of potentially homophobic sentiments. But the student was openly gay!

“It’s quite aggravating,” he said. “I can’t wear my shirt because it’s discriminating against gays. … Why would I discriminate against myself?”

So, first of all, excellent shirt, dude. Second of all, what happens to rules and guidelines meant to protect people or groups from discrimination when those people or groups co-opt the very language from which the rules are meant to protect them? Replace “gay” with a racial slur and you see the problem. Funny story on the surface, but it does raise interesting questions.

Dude sitting across the aisle from me as the train rolls out of the station. Suddenly looks around, gets a worried look on his face. Stands up and moves across the aisle to sit down facing me. Looks me in the eye and says “Whew! I had sat down on the wrong side of the train!”

I heart Berkeley.

In Jon Carroll’s column in the Chronicle today, a nearly etymological reference, disconnected:

The origin of the word “dada” is muddled, and there probably never will be a definitive answer. In “The Dada Manifesto,” Romanian poet Tristan Tzara wrote: “Freedom: DADA DADA DADA, the howl of clashing colors, the intertwining of all contradictions, grotesqueries, trivialities: LIFE.” And there you have it.

Wrapping up Palm Springs holiday with family. On the last night, finally got into the “Christmas Galaxy” (one night closed for repair, another rained out, another lines too long), just down the street from where we stayed. Artist Kenny Irwin opens his yard to public tours every year between Christmas and New Year’s — a 4-acre installation of humanoid and non-humanoid sculptures, most of them extravagantly, intensely lit, all of them fabbed from found objects, glue, wood, bone, metal, plasma generators, generic Kristmas Krap, many miles of electrical cord, and more than three million Christmas lights. Some of the sculptures weigh many tons — one is 48 feet high. Another includes something like 560 pounds of dry glue. The most elaborate sculptures sell for as much as $17,000. The tour included descriptive lines such as “This one is 40% reindeer, 50% tiger, and 30% robot.”

A castle full of living white doves at the end of the tour. All inspiring.

My images of the Christmas Galaxy, hastily output from iPhoto. Kenny’s own rather odd site describing the project.

Now if I could only figure out how this fits into Sean Graham’s General Theory of Christmas Decorations. I think we’d have to create a new category for Kenny; something like “Uber Edge.”

On the BART, a pair of off-duty mariachis, instruments in tow. Odd to seem them not performing, just riding (home?). The bass player idly plucked at strings, staring off into space. Against the din of train wheels, rushing wind, cell phone conversations, sound trickling from iPods, rustling newspapers, it was a welcome organic sound, wooden and deep, resonating in the carriage, a drop-shipment from some world not the city. Of course I don’t know that they were mariachis — they could be in a heavy metal band — “unplugged” — for all I know.

Phone-cam image. Another year before the contract on this phone runs out and I can get one with half-decent image quality…

The saga of Hopkin Green Frog continues. First it turns out that the original Hopkin poster was drawn not by a small child but by a 16-year-old autistic boy, which makes it all the more poignant.

Now C informs me that the Hopkin hunt is an ongoing meme within the halls at Ofoto. “He appears on desktops and phones everywhere. Today he made an appearance on one of the engineer’s b-day cake (and the cake was tasty!)”

It’s a mechanical hydra! It’s a mountaintop’s worst nightmare! It’s Mother Earth’s Master Molester! It’s a Photoshop fake! Nope, it’s real — all too real. “It’s a mobile strip mining machine, which can also be used to saw a country in half.” (Aldoblog). The deconstructivists would be proud; SRL wishes they had the bread to build something like this. More images.