Slumberland

Photo by Audin, Creative Commons.

Jason, in his new vehicle. He looks way too happy.

It’s a Comuta-Car (here’s another one), an electric car from 1979 or so. He and Audin both bought Comuta-Cars today. They aren’t running at the moment.

Photo by Chris Breeze.
(Creative Commons)

It’s that day again; yes, the day when all Irish pubs are jam-packed full of people and you can’t hear yourself think.

On St. Pat’s, I recommend going to a Mexican place. It will be dead quiet.

Cinco de Mayo — now that’s the day to visit the Irish pubs.

If you decide to stay in, how about a couple of Irish recipes from the always great gumbopages.com website? Stew with Lamb and Guinness and Scallion Champ oughta do the trick.

I just stumbled on Pee-Wee Herman and the Alien Invasion, a very short super-8 film shot by an 8 year old (back in the 80s, I assume). Pretty well done, considering. The claymation part works nicely. It’s not all that exciting, I guess, but it made me smile anyway.

You can compare it to Pee Wee’s Brain, which was an actual clip from Pee Wee’s Playhouse, also with claymation.

Today marks the 17th birthday of Slumberland BBS, the bulletin board system I started in 1991.

Slumberland is a Citadel board; that is, it runs one of the many kinds of Citadel BBS software. There was a time when the Seattle area had tons of Citadels. Mine is probably the last one standing. Up until only a few years ago, you could still dial in to it, using a modem and a voice line, but now it’s telnet only (if necessary, though, you can get there from a java applet on a web page.

When the BBS went up in March 1991, it was running MacCitadel software on a MacPlus. MacCitadel was OK, but it had some quirks (the kind of quirks that could eat your whole message base), and it could not network with the other Seattle Citadels. Which was important at the time, since most of us had no Internet access, so we used Citadel networking to send our messages across long distances. (As far as Texas and New York, which was pretty impressive at the time.) So I picked up a used 286 from my employer and started running TwitCit in July 1991. Later I switched to GremCit and eventually Citadel+, which is what the board runs today.

Slumberland, like most Cits, is a “message board”; it didn’t exist for games or file downloads, but for conversation. (Though we did have the odd file here and there.) We still post messages in the various “message rooms” (topic areas), and the software now also has live chat support, so many of us just hang out at Slumberland all day long, chatting when we can.

I wonder what I would have thought if, in March 1991, someone told me that Slumberland would be up and running 17 years later, and it would be the last survivor of the old Seattle Citadel network.

Jason and I visited Goodwill yesterday to browse for interesting stuff. I found a bag of vintage thread; the green ones are pictured here, but there were a lot more. Almost all of them have old fashioned wooden spools, and many are unused. Some are silk thread, but most are cotton.

I suppose that cutting down trees to make spools is not ideal, but on the other hand, it’s a lot more sound than using petroleum to make plastic ones that will never degrade. And these wooden ones seemed to have more reuse potential, too. When I was very young, my mom had some thread on wooden spools (I don’t know if it was already old even then), but ever since then all I have seen for sale is plastic. These are much nicer. Maybe bamboo could be used for spools somehow, which would be even more environmentally sound, and quite nice-looking too.

I also found some tiki mugs, a dashboard hula girl, a (faux-)vintage tin sign, and a couple of nice salwar kameez suits I am planning to resell since they don’t really fit me but are pretty nice.

Jason got a Casio SK-5 sampling keyboard, one of those late ’80s toy keyboards. I had an SK-1 myself. I got it for Christmas in 1986. They are a lot of fun to goof around with.

I was walking down the aisle at Target the other day when I saw this set of Christmas stocking hangers. At first glance, I thought that they were just rearranged by a prankster, but if you look closely, you can see that all the letters are attached to the box by plastic zip ties. I checked, and all of them were quite firmly attached. If there is a prankster, he or she managed to replace the zip ties and fasten that P in there firmly.

Or maybe this is another case of poor quality control.

This photo of mine, of some glassware with an interesting (and geeky) brand name, just got posted on BoingBoing.

If any BoingBoing readers are visiting, hello and welcome! Sorry, there’s a lot of knitting stuff here. But other things too. And there will be more.

Just a quick note. I didn’t get around to posting the rest of the European trip stuff yet, because I had an oh-so-exciting trip to the emergency room instead. This was followed by a fascinating guided tour of an operating room, a brief sojourn in a recovery room, and a restful time in a hospital room with a lovely view of the TV towers on Seattle’s First Hill. This place was called “Swedish”, but looked nothing like IKEA. And I didn’t get Swedish pancakes and lingonberry sauce either. But they got my appendix. Bye appendix. We had some great times together.

If necessary, I blame this post on the post-op pain meds.

I saw this Halloween decoration on sale at Jo-Ann Crafts in Renton, WA the other day. “Trick or Treak”? The least they could do was have a native English-speaker look over the stuff at some point before the product got sent out to all the stores. They probably made thousands of these cheap, crappy, ugly, and misspelled halloween decorations.

Is “treak” some reference I’m unfamiliar with? Or intended to be some mixture of “trick” and “freak”? (Or “tweak”? Is Dracula a tweaker? It might explain the bug eyes.) I don’t think so. I think this is what happens when a company is so cheap that no one gets paid to do any quality control.

(Sorry the photo’s got some blur. It was a camera phone pic.)

I wonder if the Seattle P-I photographer who took this photo intended to evoke this famous painting? (About which, more here.)

Sherman likes belly rubs. But he reacts differently when Jason or I rub his belly. When I do it, he purrs and rolls around and is generally all lovey and sweet. When Jason does it, he grabs his hand and starts to chew on it and attack it (playfully, not hostilely).

My theory is that he thinks I’m his mom. And he thinks Jason is a fellow kitten. A very large one.

Photo by Edward Scissorhands
Tour.

I promised a review of Edward Scissorhands, directed by Matthew Bourne, and currently running at the 5th Avenue Theater. I don’t have time to write a real review, but here’s a quick note about it.

If you go to see it, be aware that it’s basically a modern ballet. There is no dialogue; there are no lyrics. It’s all music and dance. (Here’s a montage of scenes from the production on YouTube, to give you a taste of the show.) This is not necessarily a bad thing. The dancing is quite marvelous. The sets are very cool. The music is pretty good, though I admit my ears perked up whenever I actually heard some of Danny Elfman’s motifs from the film (much of the music in the stage version is original, but the Elfman motifs pop up here and there — and note that they are featured in the montage I linked to above). I thought the pacing was a bit poor in places, causing the show to drag.

My main problem with it, though, is that it did not seem to have the emotional core that the movie has. I’m a big fan of the film, and it chokes me up every time I see it. But there was no time when the stage version elicited that kind of emotional response. One reason was that this adaptation seems to miss some of the basic elements of Edward’s personality. For example, there’s a moment when Edward flips off the bad guy with his scissor finger. Sure, that shows his anger, but it seems terribly out of character; Edward is an innocent.

The circumstances of Edward’s “father’s” death are changed, which seems an odd artistic choice (and rather less tragic than the version in the film), and there’s a strange and useless segment at the beginning in which Edward’s “father” is apparently inspired by a real live child, playing with scissors, who dies.

Certainly some of my disappointment with this version could be due to my familiarity with and affection for the original film. Perhaps I would have felt differently about the production if I had not seen the film, and certainly the audience seemed to enjoy it.

The one moment when the play really did get me was, strangely enough, at the curtain call, when Edward comes out, and there’s a nice surprise.

Having said all of this, I should add that it was an enjoyable evening, and it wasn’t a bad show at all; it just seemed as if it could be better. If you can get discounted tickets, that’s probably the best option.

The Kool-Aid didn’t do much. I left it on for 3 hours. It added a touch of color to the brown hair, but only the slightest bit to the white hair. That’s OK; it was basically just a goofy experiment since I had the materials on hand. I think the thing is that you have to use heat, and I didn’t.

Regarding the post earlier about Edward Scissorhands — a commenter thought I was being “mean-spirited” somehow in what I said. I am not sure how. First, the tickets clearly come from the promoters working on behalf of the show. Second, they suggested that I promote a ticket code in the blog. This is pretty clearly a marketing effort on behalf of the show. (And not a terrible one, either.) Now, I am grateful for the tickets, and appreciate them very much — but I feel pretty strongly that I should be upfront about whether I am getting freebies before I post reviews or recommendations. Because those will affect how you interpret what I say.

I was a journalist at one point. I have gotten a lot of press passes to various events. Most journalists do. (I sort of miss that about it, actually… I was dead broke back then but always got to go to a lot of great shows.) The publications I worked for then didn’t say up front, “hey, our reviewers are going to all of these shows for free,” possibly because it was assumed that everyone knew that the press always gets in free. (Some publications don’t accept any freebies whatsoever, but I don’t know if that means they don’t let their reviewers get in on “the list” or what. And I imagine the publication pays for anything that must be paid for, so it’s probably free to the reporter either way.)

Now that my only writing is in a blog, if I write about something I enjoy, people probably don’t think of me as “the press”; they probably think of me as an individual writing about things I enjoy (or not). If I say that I went for pizza and it was great, they probably don’t expect that I got the pizza for free with the knowledge that I might write about it. Because, these days, I don’t get those kind of press benefits. (And I don’t write that many reviews, though I’ve considered expanding what I post here.)

I would like to believe that when I read someone’s opinion on a blog, that it is that person’s honest opinion, and not something they posted because they are getting free stuff and want to keep getting more. So that is why I posted as I did. I got a bit of a windfall, and that’s OK and I am grateful, but when I do write about the show, I am going to post honest opinions whether I like the show or not.

Well, I don’t post often enough in the best of times, but dealing with 3 weeks of bronchitis made me a lot less motivated to post. You know how it is — you do the minimum you have to do, and then your brain just shuts down for a while. And now that I am well, I keep feeling as if nothing I want to post about is important enough to post after such a long posting drought.

So, I decided I’d just post about some random stuff to get back into the posting mode.
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Photo by litlnemo.

I finished the laptop sleeve this week! It came out quite nice; I think it will do a great job of keeping my Macbook from getting scratched! Here is the pattern.

It takes three skeins of Cascade 220 (two main color, one contrast color), and is knitted in the round, double-stranded. It has a zipper around three sides, so you can open it up all the way instead of having to slide the laptop in and out of a pouch-type bag. It’s a quick knit and lots of fun.

Here are a couple more pics (click on each to see the larger photos at Flickr):

If you make one of these, please send me a picture! I’ll post a link to it here.

(Wondering why the pattern is “Detlef-13″? Well, the original name turned out to already be taken, by a German maker of laptop sleeves. And Detlef, a German name, is “felted” backwards.)