Monkey Song

It was hard to find a lyric for this post. Seemed odd to pick one that focuses on the until-3:30-a.m. drive back from Madison instead of the concert that brought us there, but by heck the lyric game is firmly established as the new thing that is cool. Anyway – here’s a picture of me from yestereve:

I’ve already blogged nostalgic about how I wish the Storyhill-listening experience could be what it once was, so I won’t go over that ground again (unless there’s interest, I guess; I am getting to the point of being desperately short on blogging ideas). They’re not blow-your-eyeballs-out-of-the-back-of-your-head amazing anymore, but still good enough and more than good enough to make 7 hours of driving completely worthwhile. Plus, I’ve put enough Storyhill Nerd groupie time now that they know me and I get to hang out with them before and after the show and discuss things like how lame NACA is and John’s new CD project (Psalms set to music).

I’ll let the picture fill in the other 814 words.

Far more than half, obviously, but I figured in light of the protest over the last post I’d pick a less obscure lyric for this one’s title. It’s Mostly Unrelated Thoughts With Bullet Points time again, kids! Yay and yay (and yay)!

• Monday night Matt and I played one of the most fun concerts we’ve played in our time as CST, made all the more fun by the fact that we fully expected it to be at best an okay show. We were playing for the Coralville Farmer’s Market, which generally means a couple of people are actually watching but mostly you’re providing background music for the shopping multitudes. So we didn’t concern ourselves overmuch with details like determining a set list or showing up early to set up or run through anything; we were expecting a low-key hour and a half or so of running through some tunes.

  Instead, though, the show turned into a little EWALU reunion by the Aquatic Center. By the time we were half an hour into our set there were 10 former EWALU staffers there, covering all the summers from ’93 to ’05 between them. Several people Matt and I hadn’t seen for a very long time, too – if only for that it would have been a really fun evening. But on top of that we were playing for an audience that was (or at least seemed to be) really familiar with and into our music, and that’s sort of an unusual treat for us; we’re usually playing for a few close friends and several people who have no idea who we are. It’s a lot of fun to have people singing along (and at least a couple of those attendant could have taken over vocal duties on most of our songs, I think). Sort of reminded me of the crowds at Legends when Storyhill would come to Waverly, although that’s probably a bit over-hubristic. So thanks very much, if any of you concert-goers read this blog – the evening turned into quite a treat for Matt and I.

• Un-cool-ly, I was trying to sing the whole time through a badly scratchy throat that I’ve been dealing with for about three weeks now. If I had any symptoms other than coughing and voice raspitude I’d think I had bronchitis, but I’m sure it’s just some sort of persistant cold probably exacerbated by fall allergies. It sucked immensely Monday night, though – my high range was a full fifth lower than it usually is and a lot of the CST repertoire requires me to use the far upper end of my vocal range. Yet another reason it was good the audience was already familiar with the music, I guess. By the end of the show I could barely talk. Then yesterday morning I had my full range back and I thought I’d come up with a new miracle cure – Having trouble with losing your voice? Force yourself to sing for two and a half hours anyway! But now it’s as bad as it’s ever been again, so apparently my career as a miracle cure inventor will need to wait a bit longer yet.
• Also un-cool-ly (indeed, far more un-cool-ly), for the last several months I’ve also had a great deal of trouble convincing my left hand that playing guitar is fun. Now, I’ll admit that the left hand doesn’t have a very glamorous job in the guitar-playing process. It doesn’t get to actually make any noise or execute fancy flourishes like the right hand does, it just gets to press down thin metal wires, which is apparently unpleasant enough that it requires developing thick callouses to deal with. It starts out as the primary hand – beginning guitar players focus exclusively on the fretting hand – but eventually gets pushed back to secondary importance as the guitarist realizes that the right hand is the one actually making the music. So I’m not saying I don’t empathize, but I think my left hand’s passed beyond merely dissatisfied and into active rebellion and I find that uncool. For a while the hand was just fatiguing more quickly than it used to, but then it decided that wasn’t a strong enough message and starting throwing in the occasional shooting pain across the back of the hand (only when I was playing guitar, though – apparently that’s the thing that angers it most). Just this last summer it threw complete lock-ups into the mix, wherein my left fingers just sort of freeze for a while (that’s only happened twice, thankfully). Now I certainly won’t claim that the guitar-playing world at large would experience any sense of loss if I gave into my hand and stopped playing, but I sort of enjoy it so I hope that eventually my hand and I can come to some sort of accord. I’ve considered buying a left-handed guitar and learning to play that way to placate my left hand, but I’m afraid that would just make my right hand angry at me instead.

  I hope Mom still never reads this blog…

• Allow me to point your attention again to the NEW LINKS over in the LinkyList on the right. I notice that no one has yet written a review for Folksinging or Second Whisper and that people are reading the CST forum but not chiming in (or starting threads – really, people, anything at all you’d like to talk about). C’mon – putting your opinions on the Internet is fun! Particularly I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on the Folksinging issue on the forum.
• This is a really well-written blog entry. I completely agree, Carrie. Hooray for the passing of summer weather!
• It wasn’t all that long ago that it was very simple being a Hawkeye football and Cubs baseball fan. You entered the season prepared to take deep satisfaction in whatever the team was prepared to offer. “Well, we lost 9 games – but remember when we almost beat Michigan?” “No team in the history of the game blew more leads in the ninth inning than we did this season – but wasn’t it fun to watch Sosa hit 66 home runs?” Now both teams have become teams that are expected to do well, and I find that emotionally problematic. The Cubs are having an entirely Cub-like season this year, but because they were supposed to have the best pitching staff in the Major Leagues and a save-the-world caliber manager and therefore win the National League Central and make it to the World Series I’m very disappointed in how the season’s gone. Once upon a time Derrek Lee’s breakout year would have been good enough for me. The Hawkeyes are being picked in at least the top fifteen by every poll that’s been released, and therefore I’m already primed to be disappointed if they don’t make it to (and win) another New Year’s Day bowl game. Anyone have any suggestions for some consistently underachieving sports teams I can root for?
• And finally, an amusing anecdote from my workplace. The computers on the inpatient units at the UIHC are out in places on the floor where people often walk by and can see the screens, and apparently there was an issue recently where a patient’s family member walked by a computer that had been left with a browser window open to some sort of women-in-swimwear-oriented website. They found that inappropriate and said as much to someone in the administration, and so in typical University fashion swift and decisive action was taken – a screen saver was put on all the computers reminding staff to (and I quote) “Restrict surfing to offensive or objectionable websites.”

  I search in vain for a closing quip to top that.

A couple of business items before I get down to the business of musing. As a compromise between accomodating those of you who’ve requested another “name that quote” game and those of you who’ve mocked me for using “name that quote” games as a way to duck having to actually write some sort of interesting content, for the remainder of my posts in 2005 (I’ve got 38 to go if I’m going to meet my once-a-week goal – yeep. I may have to Jason Fox my way through some of them) – or at least until I get tired of playing – the post title will be a lyric from either a Central Standard Time or a Storyhill or a Beatles song. You, oh Gentle Readers, get to play the name-the-lyric game with every post while still having something content-ful to read every month and a half or so! Exciting, exciting stuff; let it not be said we here at Meaningless Musings don’t try to provide our readership with what it’s asking for. Plus I just got to list CST with Storyhill and the Beatles, which I found immensely cool.

Also, you may notice there are a few new links over in the list-o-links to the right. Central Standard Time’s music is finally available for purchase through a medium less cumbersome than printing out an order sheet, mailing it in with a check, and waiting for several weeks for us to remember to mail you your CD – Second Whisper and Folksinging are both available for sale through CD Baby. It remains to be seen, I guess, whether that’ll actually translate into significantly more sales, but certainly it should simplify the process; I’ve bought a dozen or so CDs from CD Baby and been extremely impressed with how quick and easy to work with they are. If you’d be so kind, Matt and I would appreciate it much if you’d click on the links, check out the site (thus increasing our traffic, which CD Baby uses to help determine which of their albums are popular and therefore worth recommending), and write a brief review or two. And, you know, if you feel moved to actually buy a copy…

There’s also a link to the new Central Standard Time discussion forum. I’m immensely curious to see how this turns out; I stumbled across it last night as I was looking through the administration page for our website to see what sorts of nerdly programming dealies (that’s the technical term) the site supports with an eye towards putting a guestbook on the site. All that was required was to activate the forum page – it’s part of the package deal we’re paying for through the web hosting company. So stop on by and sign up for a username. It’s very low-impact; they ask for an e-mail adress and your name and a username. I’m assured that none of it will ever come back to haunt you as spam, but if you’re nervous there’s no checkup system to assure that you’re entering a valid e-mail adress or name. Let’s see if we can’t make it an interesting discussion forum. Any topic’s free game, although I suppose Matt and I should probably reserve the right to censor anything egregiously offensive.

Thanks muchly. We now return you to your regularly scheduled post.

This is the first week after the end of summer camp up at EWALU (an aside here, just because this misspelling seems to be gaining credibility and if you can’t rant about something like this on your own blog what’s the point of blogging in the first place? Somehow the word “EWALU” has lost its identity as a cool acronym and is being widely misspelled “Ewalu.” This is nothing short of wrong and should be fiercely mocked whenever you come across it. Thanks) and for the first time in seven years I feel a very strong, sharp sense of loss with the passing of the summer. I wasn’t on staff this summer but I was around as much as possible. I spent a full week as a camp grandpa and another half-week after my whitewater(ish) rafting trip with Mark and a couple more isolated Wednesday nights, soaking up the experience of being back in the middle of a camp summer and trying to be helpful where I could. It was very weird for me to be at camp without a clearly defined role; I’m sure I ended up being in the way more often than I was actually helpful and I had to constantly ignore Rule 7 from The Introvert’s Handbook (“Always assume people don’t want you around”) or I never would have interacted with anyone, since I didn’t have any responsibilities that could provide initial interactions. It was painfully awkward and yet still completely worth the social discomfort. I’d forgotten how astoundingly, wonderfully, downright freaking awesome summer camp is. Being back out in the woods and singing the old songs again and watching the counselors with their kids and spending time with the kids myself and watching the magical social environment that a Christian community of college students creates was as energizing and recharging for me as it ever was. More so, even, since I wasn’t coming to camp from a college environment that was almost as neat-o; I’m sure I drove the staff nuts talking about how much I’d missed being there.

This summer’s was a very good staff, too. Extremely extremely good. Remarkably, they’re also almost all first-year staff; a big crew of long-timers all finished their tours of duty last summer and turned things over to a bunch of rookies. Hopefully this group will end up being the next group of long-timers, because they’re a really impressive bunch of Bible camp staffers.

And now the summer’s over. If I go up to camp tonight I won’t get to see the mime and hang out and watch Jesse play guitar with the summer staff at the Wednesday night all-camp campfire (Jesse had no problems with feeling awkward as a non-staffer being at camp – or at least he didn’t let them stop him from jumping right in, if he did. I was immensely jealous of that) and sit around the remnants of the fire afterward talking until far too late. If I go up tomorrow there won’t be a hoedown to play for. The staff is on their way back to college, and I don’t even get to do that. Instead I’m back at work now, sitting in a clean, air-conditioned building with people who’ve all showered in the past 24 hours and who would look at me like I was crazy if I broke out into a song about what sorts of sounds a little green frog might or might not be expected to make. I’m also back in a world where what I do is more important than who I am and a world where the job is only done because of the money. The real world, I know, but it doesn’t make me miss the one I was around any less. Greg’s latest post describes the feeling very well, I think. And much more articulately.

On the other hand, though, I certainly didn’t come away from my sort-of summer empty-handed. In just the few days I was there I made some new friends, learned a bunch of new camp songs (most of which I wouldn’t replace any of the old catalog with if I was planning a worship service at camp (which I’ll be doing in only a month and a half – yay and yay!), but a few of which were pretty catchy), got as close to a tan as my Norwegian heritage will allow – and re-learned a lot of things about myself that EWALU taught me once and I’d started to forget. Being an EWALU staffer is the one thing in my life that have no hesitation about saying I was good at. For four summers I was one of the leaders on staff and I got to go to bed at night knowing that I’d been part of making the campers’ experience that much better. Even though there are only a few people around the place that remember those summers and even through the awkwardness of not really having a role it was still immensely good for me to be able to slip back into some of those old mental pathways. My attitude here at the hospital is much better (although I’m sure this place will grind me down again, given time), I’ve gone from thinking I’d probably resign as a youth director this fall to being extremely excited to try again to build the program and do some effective ministry in spite of the bureaucracy. I wake up smiling these days; I didn’t do that back in May. If that’s what a total of maybe a dozen days at camp as a non-staffer can do for me, I definitely need to figure out a way to log summer #7 on staff one of these soon-upcoming years. And maybe #8 and #9.

Smarmy, yes, but it’s exciting stuff for me. I’ll post more details of my vacation trips sometime later on (I have, after all, 38 more posts to post before Greg’s birthday); this one I wanted to be more about the end of summer. If anyone from this summer staff is reading this, thank you for letting me be part of EWALU again. And I hope you’re planning on being back in 2006.

Little to say today, but being the dedicated blogger I am I persevere and post even though said post may be uninteresting. I’ll do the old snippets bit, but avoid using the bullet points so it doesn’t look like a snippets post. Cagey, no?

I have been woefully derelict in not hitherto noting that there’s a new blog linked over in the Links O’ Blogs section to the right. Welcome to the blogging world, Hibby!. I stumbled across his blog quite by accident – as many of you probably already know, if you click on the “view my complete profile” link on a Blogspot page you’re taken to a page where (if the blogger’s filled in his/her personal information) there’s a list of the blogger’s favorite books/music/movies/etc. The listed items are links, and if you click on one you’re presented with a list of everyone else who’s listed the same thing. I clicked on “Central Standard Time” on my profile a couple of weeks ago to see if anyone else had listed us as “Favorite Music” and Matt’s profile popped up, along with mine and a grand total of one other person (two, now – hi, Carrie!). Apparently CST isn’t huge in the blogosphere, but at least we’re plenty fond of ourselves. Anyway, Matt’s blog is quite interesting reading and now that he’s no longer a secret blogger by all means add him to your daily readin’ blogs.

Here’s a little free summertime advice from me to you – if you find yourself needing surgery or other significant medical care, try like heck to avoid having your hospital stay be in July. May and June are far away the best months for hospitalization, but even August is far far better than July. Why? Because July 1 is New Residents Day – the day every year when first year residents become second year residents and second year residents become third year residents and – this is the scary bit – med students become first year residents. After a lifetime as students, the paralyzing responsibility of holding a patient’s life in their hands is thrust upon new residents, as well as one of the most punishing work schedules in any field of employment. Often they acquit themselves very nicely, but nonetheless in my experience the beginning of July at a hospital tends to look like an episode of The Keystone Cops. Entertaining, to be sure, but not the sort of “Yes, I do know how best to keep you alive” care most people prefer from their hospital experience.

On Sunday I leave for a week at camp – Jesse and I are off to be Camp Grandpas at EWALU for a week. I have mixed feelings about it; on the one hand I’m beside myself with excitement at the thought of being back in the midst of the summer camp experience, but at the same time I’m terrified that I’m about to be the weird staff alumnus (and “grandpa” is an apt term – there are counselors on staff who were campers of counselors who were campers of mine. In a society of colleg students, 30 is really old) who can’t stay away but doesn’t fit in, either. I have so many strong, defining positive memories of EWALU – it would be horrible to have my most recent experience be a negative one.

Overall, though, I’m mostly excited. I think a little anxiety about the week being a horrible experience might be a good thing – not only will it help keep me from being too exuberant about being there (and therefore annoying), but lowered expectations, as Calvin teaches us, make it that much more likely that they’ll be exceeded. Besides, one way or another I’m committed so I might as well enjoy myself. Jesse and I leave Sunday morning (in separate cars – Jesse’s not a carpooler, for reasons that have never been completely clear to me) for camp. And if any of you are in the Strawberry Point area on Friday, CST will be playing a “We Just Can’t Leave” concert at 7:30 in – or possibly out in front of; we haven’t decided – Cedar Lodge.

It’ll be interesting to see how I adjust to being cut off from the world for a week. It never used to bother me when I was there for a whole summer, but that was before e-mail and discussion boards and blogs and it was back when I was gone for the whole summer instead of just a week. On the upside, I won’t have to hear about how the Cubs are doing. Here’s hoping the forecasts are wrong and it’ll be 80 degrees all next week! Happy mid-early July, everyone!

I have no experience with this. In my entire life I’ve bonded with exactly one pet, and this morning she had to be put down. I can’t get my head around the idea that she’ll never again announce someone at the door, or put her head on my leg and beg to be petted, or sit at the top of the stairs and wait for the garage door to open so she’ll know her people are home and her day can begin. I’m completely blindsided by how much this hurts.

I have clearer pictures, but none that show her smiling like this one does so I’m prepared to put up with the grainy quality and poor exposure. Rest in peace, girl. I wish I’d gotten to tell you one last time you were a good dog.

“Just a dog” my ass. The angels in heaven will forevermore know when their clothes are finished drying.

Fair’s fair – since Mark went to the effort of making a quiz about me, I’ve compiled for your quiz-taking pleasure the Mark DeVries challenge. Check the scoreboard to see how your Markish knowledge compares with the masses at large.

And on with the musing…

A week and a half ago (sorry for the anachronistic post) was originally supposed to be a CST concert night, but the show was cancelled when the Uptown Bill’s scheduler guy (who, for the record, is both an extremely friendly guy and a tireless champion of live music in Iowa City – I don’t mean to say that what happened was anything other than a mistake) realized that he’d booked two acts for the same night. The other act had gotten their contract in before we got ours in, so we were bumped. Not a big deal, I guess – the Uptown Bill’s shows are always fun but rarely very well-attended – but it’s frustrating. We have enough trouble trying to find places to play without having shows disappear. We’ll get rescheduled, I’m sure, and I understand that mistakes happen, but it still sort of eats.

On the upside, though, it left me with a free Saturday night for the first time in quite a while. I got to watch the Cubs get whipped by the Yankees, play through my Storyhill songbook (Mary on the Mountain, after umpteen playings, is starting to fall under the fingers), catch up on some reading, and spend a little time ruminating about CST-ish-ly things.

Matt had some interesting thoughts on his blog about the cancellation. I’ll quote the pertinent bits here:

On a completely unrelated note, I was disappointed today to find out that Charlie’s and my upcoming show this Saturday night had to be cancelled due to a scheduling conflict. It seems the venue was double-booked, so we were left out in the cold. Ah, well. That sort of thing has happened to us a few times now. It’s not the best feeling when we’re told, “Yeah, you were on the schedule, but someone else wanted to play that day, so what could we do?” Granted, one of the other times it happened we were bumped for a pretty big name act, so I really couldn’t blame the venue. This time, though, not so much. Some band I’ve never heard of. To be fair, they’ve likely never heard of Central Standard Time (our band, I mean, not the time zone).

And so it goes with CST. One day we might feel poised to take the music world (or at least the local market) by storm, the next we might feel ready to put away the guitars and sound equipment and call it quits for CST. I don’t think we’ll do that anytime soon. We do so enjoy performing and playing together, and it’s really a pretty easy hobby to keep up, so I guess there’s no real reason for us to quit. I certainly don’t want to quit. I hope Charlie doesn’t want to quit. I hope there are a least a few people out there who would be disappointed if we ever quit.

Matt and I rarely discuss CST in any sort of where-are-we-going-with-this sense. We’ve exchanged hundreds of e-mails about how to get more shows and about how frustrated we often are with ourselves for not playing more but we very rarely have Where Are We Going With This Band Thing, Anyway? conversations. We both shy away from the tremendous amount of work that would be involved in moving up to the next level – which would be a locally-touring, concert-every-other-week-or-so band. And the level beyond that – a full-time-job, nationally touring band (which is still several steps down from a nationally-known, played-on-the-radio, making-the-band-members-fistfuls-of-cash level) – is basically unworkable. Neither of us can afford to quit our jobs and hope the band starts paying for itself and Matt has quite a bit tying him to the Iowa City area.

So where do we want CST to go? The model, of course, has always been Storyhill (which makes them laugh – “You want to do this?” John said to me when I expressed our dream of being Storyhill II to him. “Man, you seem brighter than that.”). I can’t speak for Matt – since, as noted above, we haven’t really talked about this much – but I would be deliriously happy to be playing Storyhill-type concerts, even if they were only once a month and didn’t take us to exotic locales. If people were as interested to hear what we have to say with our music as I am to hear them that would be so incredibly neat that I can’t even find words for it. That seems like a lofty goal, though, since Storyhill (who are immensely more talented than we are to start off with) built their fan base with several years of full-time touring, with all the musical solidification and copious new material that comes along with it. CST being almost certain to never be a full-time touring act it’s probably best to put thoughts of Storyhill-ic success out of mind.

So where does that leave us? I honestly don’t know – like Matt said, sometimes it seems like we’re on the verge of taking the local market by storm, sometimes it seems like we might as well stop pretending we deserve to be paid for performing. We’ve averaged a show a month for the last year and a half, and there’s no reason we can’t maintain that average pretty much indefinitely. I’d like to (and I’m pretty sure Matt would like to) push beyond that a little and set ourselves up in the local college act circuit and maybe travel out West at least a couple of times, but I’ve no idea how to take that next step. We experimented with having a friend be a booking agent for a while, and that was going very well until he got tired of it and moved on to things that interested him more (we’d be interested in trying again, if anyone would be interested). We went to NACA and so far haven’t had any return on that investment. Once upon a time, we were sure that success was just a matter of waiting for people to start coming to find us. We’re past that, but still not sure how to get to a point where venues will start calling or booking right away because they know people will come out to hear us.

You need to approach the task of self-promotion as a musician with a fair amount of hubris, and that’s hard for Matt and me both. While still disciplining yourself to refine your product and continue producing new songs, you need to approach concerts and booking contacts projecting a “wait’ll you hear this!” vibe. Not arrogant, necessarily (at least not in the folk music genre), but confident. As I once described the Storyhill experience, throw the music out at the audience and dare them not to like it. We’re getting better at that (we don’t apologize to audiences before songs anymore, generally) but it’s sort of a Catch-22: confidence both comes from and leads to success.

So where will CST be in five more years? I’d guess probably where we are right now; playing a show a month or so and wishing we were playing more. Maybe (hopefully) that’s pessimistic – certainly ‘twould be divine to have the band be a significant source of income – but barring significant lifestyle and/or personality changes on Matt’s and my part I think CST will probably stay more or less on the plan it’s established. On the other hand, to answer your question, Hibsy-Wibsy, I’ve no plans to quit.

Not so much of a coherent or get-to-a-point-ish blog entry; that’s largely because I don’t have many clearly organized thoughts on this topic. Anyone with any thoughts and/or expertise on the subject please weigh in – I’d very much like to hear from you. And, again, if the idea of being a booking agent has always appealed, let us know.

My skills at transitions are pretty anemic on the best of days and tonight I feel particularly mentally listless so I’ll fall back on the time-honored Unassociated List Of Hopefully Somewhat Interesting But At The Very Least Space Filling snippets. Cheery-o and whatnot!

• There are a couple of new blogs on the List-o-Blogs to the right. Mark and Carrie (who chose one of my favorite quotes of all time as her blog title – yay, Carrie! Wissmanized, I suppose it would be: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies enjoy bananas”…). Interesting reads, both – they’re only two posts in, each, and they’ve already covered economic theory, the angst involved in trying to figure out where the time’s gone, and theories on Biblical interpretation. Welcome to the blogosphere, kids! Come and waste time with us!
• I learned earlier tonight that John Hermanson (of Storyhill/Chris & Johnny, Alva Star, and Olympic Hopefuls fame) is, in addition to being a busy performer and running a profitable studio, the music director at his church in the Twin Cities. He’s working on liturgical music, which seems very appropriate to me; a lot of his music has a worshipful feel to it (Boulder River and Absaroka Air are the first two that jump to mind). Talk about living the dream; between him and Rich Bruxvoort-Colligan I’m optimistic that there’s money to be made for people interested in trying to be part of the church music and folk music worlds at the same time. Of course, I’m not worthy to hold either of those guys’ picks, but it’s a big country; there must be some un-staked-out territory out there somewhere.
• The mystery of Exactly What Happened To Adam Kamp After He Left Oregon was resolved yesterday when I walked into the new Mongolian barbecue place in Coralville and there he was, dining with his family. He’s living in Moose Lake, which he describes as being “two-thirds of the way from Minnesota to Duluth.” Seems to be doing well, although we didn’t get a chance to talk for long.
• Over this last week I’ve gotten reacquainted with an old friend when my copy of X-Wing: Collector’s Series came in the mail. Ah, the many hours I whiled (piddled?) away in Jason’s room back on Clinton Ground North saving the galaxy from the Empire, receiving accolades from the Rebel High Command, and generally being cool. The graphics (even in the updated-for-not-so-much-DOS Collector’s Series) are dated, but the gameplay and storyline are still first-rate, and programs like Kali make multiplayer much simpler than in days of yore (when you had to call someone else’s computer directly or fill out punch cards full of 1′s and 0′s and mail ‘em to the other player).
• Summer camp is underway at EWALU, and even though it’s been seven years since my last summer there it’s still weird for me. Seems like when summer starts I should be heading off to the woods; I wonder if that will ever go away. I’m going to be a volunteer for a week in July, which is exciting but a very nerve-wracking prospect. I want to be part of a summer camp experience again, but I’m not at all interested in being the weird staff alum who can’t let the place go. Nifty, isn’t it, how almost any experience can be turned into a frightening prospect if you just go looking for things that might go wrong?
• This was pointed out to me by Mark (I think), but I was so amused by it I simply must post it here – isn’t Obi-Wan’s line in Revenge of the Sith, “Only the Sith deal in absolutes!” funny? If Anakin had just replied, “Only the Sith?” it would have made up for the whole “This is a drag” series of horrid one-liners in Attack of the Clones
• From the Fun Things One Can Find Out On The Internet file we have www.quizyourfriends.com. You can make a multiple-choice quiz about anything at all and have it out in cyberspace for people to take. Fun stuff – here’s mine. It’s a variety of questions pulled from high school, college, and camp; I guess I’ll be a little surprised if anyone can get ‘em all, but I sure do encourage you to try! Check out the scoreboard to see how you did. Certainly gives one a little more respect for teachers putting together multiple-choice quizzes; it’s hard to think of three wrong answers for each question. Of course, this time of year I have basically no sympathy for teachers at all, but that’s a whole new tangent that I’ll not go down here.

Snippets R Us. Coming soon – Meaningless Musings Quote Fun, Part III (or perhaps III)! Since I’m sure I won’t post again before Sunday, Happy Father’s Day to my dad and any other fathers (or you two fathers-soon-to-be) out there.

A couple of quick other-peoples’-blogs related notes before I carry on with the uninteresting substance of this post (this week, a rant!).

Last week I had the interesting new experience of having mine be someone’s blog of the day. Bill found my blog searching for the Peanuts strip I used in last month’s the comic strip nameaquote game and dropped me an e-mail. Fascinating, entertaining guy and his is a fascinating, entertaining blog (linked over on the bloglist on the right). He’s a church musician (check out his website – I’d love to put together a group like Fly By Light someday), a fellow adult ADD-ian, and his kids must have scriptwriters working for them. Spend some time perusing the archives on his site – very much worth your time.

In other blog-ish news, tomorrow will mark the unveiling of Jesse Klosterboer’s new blog, which will be focused on discussing the sort of fundamental life issues that his mind gravitates towards like no one else I’ve ever met. Sounds like it will be a very cool format – Jesse will lay out his thoughts and feelings about the issue du jour and then (in theory, at least) the comments will be a lively discussion and everyone will end up having learned something new and having been exposed to new thoughts and viewpoints and generally better people. I’ll add a URL to my URList as soon as Jesse sends me one.

And on to the rambling nonsense – this week, Meaningless Musings takes on the metric system!

I was first introduced to the idea that the metric system is fundamentally better than the Old English system (the one we generally use now – feet and ounces and quarts and miles and whatnot (it’s also commonly called just the English system, but to avoid sounding like I’m talking about how they measure things in Britain (which, to make things more confusing, I sort of am – but they have their own super-quirky system with stone and crumpets and things) I’ll use the longer name)) in sixth grade. Miss Koshatka was talking to our science class (I don’t believe it was anything fancier than just “science.” Maybe General Science or Really, Really Basic Science or something. We were just sixth graders, after all, and not sixth graders in a world-class school district by any means) and she explained to us how horribly backwards and wrong the U.S. was to not yet have switched over to the metric system. All of Europe uses the metric system! she told us. It’s so much better! It’s easier! It’s more fun! It goes with any color pants! We must must MUST all start using the metric system and we must do so NOW or we might as well just let the Enemy march right in!

Obviously I exaggerate a little, but the basic idea that we were somehow functionally lacking as a nation because of our choice of measuring systems really hit me. Wow, I thought, I hadn’t realized I was doing anything wrong. So for the next few weeks I dutifully learned about grams and kilograms and meters and liters and corrected my parents when they used Old English units and generally tried to be a good little 11-year-old citizen.

Over the rest of my academic life I’ve heard the same spiel again and again, albeit never again with nearly as much political rhetoric: the Old English system is fundamentally inferior to the metric system. The U.S. is doing itself a disservice by stubbornly resisting change, but certainly the day is just around the corner when we’ll open our collective eyes and beat our yardsticks into plowshares and join the global community. I really don’t think I’ve ever had a science teacher since Miss Koshatka fail to make some variant on that speech, and every time I hear it I think it’s more ridiculous than the time before. Let’s examine some of the arguments for metricizing, what say?

The main argument (indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the “We suck ’cause we’re not with the times, measuring-stuff-wise” argument made without this point being front and center) is that unit conversion is very easy with the metric system. 1000 meters in a kilometer makes it very easy to determine that there are 3879.24 meters in 3.87924 kilometers, or – if you really want to have some fun – 387,924 centimeters! 30 milliliters is 0.03 liters – or 30 cubic centimeters! One minute is… well, still 60 seconds. They didn’t mess with that.

Being the good little sheep (na-na na-na na-na-na-na – Leader!) that I was, it took me years to question the intrinsic value of those easy conversions, but once I started thinking about it, I realized that I was often having a strong “who cares?” reaction. 1.7 kilometers is 1700 meters? Who cares? I can’t think of a single thing that I would ordinarily measure in kilometers but need to also know in meters, or vice-versa. The two units are used in totally different reference frames – it’s 160 kilometers to Waverly, she’s 1.8 meters tall. Easy though it is to convert in my head and say it’s 160,000 meters to Waverly and she’s .0018 kilometers tall, those numbers are meaningless unless they’re converted back. In fact, I think the metric system suffers from not having a sub-meter unit bigger than the centimeter (indeed, I wonder why the decimeter isn’t ever used for just that reason). Feet and yards are both in that convenient Gets Used Every Day range where even though the conversion is a mentally taxing three feet to a yard they’re still both useful. More so than, say, the easily-converted-betwixt nano- and micrometer.

Same thing with weights. 1000 grams in a kilogram? Great! Who cares? Things are either grams or kilograms; it’s nifty but not useful that the conversion’s easy. Liquid measure is sort of muddled since the soda companies have familiarized us with liters (trying, no doubt, to save us from intellectual Purgatory. Bless them), but again I’m not convinced that the cup-pint-quart-gallon system is worse than the milliter-liter one. Just like with feet and yards, allowing a measure to be twice another instead of a thousand times more than another creates several units all within a practical, useable range. I am sort of surprised that gasoline companies haven’t figured out yet that people would probably think gas at 90 cents a liter was a steal, though.

My favorite, though, is the Old English vs. metric temperature comparison. With temperature the metric system loses its ace – there aren’t kiloCentigrade degrees (I guess those’d be 1000 degrees, though) – and so to maintain the moral high ground the boiling and freezing points of water (“Boiling and freezing points at STP,” it was once explained to me by a high school science teacher, which made me sad for us as a society but was pretty funny) were set at zero and 100 degrees. This, of course, is the only logical way to set those numbers. Two of my science professors (one at Wartburg, one at Kirkwood) have waxed rhapsodic on this emminently logical choice. How Herr Fahrenheit must be rolling in his grave to think that his temperature system has random numbers like 32 and 212 as the state-changing points for water!

Good grief. And also who cares?

The freezing point of water is absolutely an important temperature in daily life – at least in daily winter life up here in the Midwest. But I don’t know of anyone who had trouble as a child remembering that 32 degrees is where water freezes. I’d wager that anyone who did would probably have trouble remembering zero as a freezing point, too. The boiling point of water is important in various culinary arts like making raman noodles or macaroni and cheese, to be sure, but it certainly isn’t something one needs to know the temperature for. I’ve never used a cooking thermometer when boiling water; I put some water in a pot and put the pot on a stove and when it’s no longer Not Boiling Yet then I assume that it’s boiling. Couldn’t care less whether that happens at 100 degrees or 212 degrees. I think there is logic in the Kelvin system – setting absolute zero as the zero point – but absolute-zero-like temperatures being pretty much exclusively the realm of research facilities and Eau Claire, Wisconsin it’s an impractical system for most of us.

I’ll concede that zero and 100 are handy reference point temperatures, but I think that’s just another argument for the Fahrenheit system. Zero degrees Fahrenheit is a reasonable cutoff temperature between tolerable and really freaking cold. Zero degrees Centigrade is just freezing – chilly, to be sure, but not necessarily even heavy coat weather (at least here in Iowa). Zero degrees Fahrenheit and temperatures below are temperatures not to be trifled with. On the other end, 100 degrees Centigrade is far past lethally warm; it’s a useless number for daily use. 100 Fahrenheit is the high-end cutoff between tolerable and intolerable. So without meaning disrepect to my learned professors, I’d argue that setting zero and 100 at the endpoints of tolerable functioning temperatures makes more sense than setting them at the freezing and boiling points of water. Let the water molecules use Centigrade in their little water molecule communities.

Obviously, I don’t want to hold us back from achieving intellectual glory, but I’m unconvinced that being able to quickly calculate how many dimes could be laid on end between here and Chicago is the key to clearing the path. Next time you hear the We’re Hopelessly Behind The Rest Of The World speech, roll your eyes at the speaker for me, okay?

I hope I didn’t steal Jesse’s first idea for a significant concept for discussion with this post…

(Apologies to Janis Ian for the post title.)

Last night at S.T. Morrison Park in Coralville Dave and Bette Rod performed in concert for the first time in five years. ‘Twas a wonderful show; they played music by artists ranging from Gershwin to Storyhill and played it with the polish and relaxed ease that 34 years of singing together brings. The crowd – which was just Laurel and me at first – steadily grew and it was great fun for me to watch people who knew them from work stunned at this new side of them. A great show on its own merits, no question about it.

For me, personally, though, it was even more – it took me back to listening to those songs ring through the house when I was a little kid, to the times I saw them play at church and at coffeehouses, to how exciting it was for me when I was finally able to sit and play along with them. And therefore it took me back to the sandbox in the backyard at 960 Sowell and riding on the tractor with cousin Dwight and croquet in the backyard on S. Kentucky Court and the pool at Heatherwood Valley Apartments and racing up and down the stairs in Chippewa Falls and painting flats on the stage in Wupperman Theater and recording radio shows in the basement on Keswick Drive and the exciting ambulance ride to the hospital in Des Moines and that weird little pretend oil derrick and a thousand other memories that are so fundamentally part of who I am that I never consciously remember them unless something triggers them. I could barely open my eyes, the air was so thick with memories – but I could surely hear just fine.

On Sunday Matt and I will be sharing the stage with them and that will be fun, too, but what a blessing and treasure it was to spend a couple of hours just listening. Joel, I wish you could have been there, but I’ll bet you can still pretty easily close your eyes and call the sounds to mind.

**Edit 5/28/05 – If you’d rather not read this whole post, check out Joel’s excellent two sentence one.

Well, I’m still not convinced this is any sort of a quality review, but I’m not sure reading over it more times will help anything, either, so here is my review of Star Wars, Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. I welcome your thoughts on the film. Particularly if you can talk me out of some of mine.

I came into Star Wars geekery fairly late in life. I saw Return of the Jedi in the theater and remember thinking it was sort of cool but a little hard to follow. Certainly it wasn’t the life-changing experience a first Star Wars viewing apparently is for most people. John tried through high school to get me into the movies but, again, I guess I just wasn’t yet ready to handle that level of advanced coolness. I was conversant with them; I knew the plots and the major plot twists and could tell Jabba the Hut from Wicket the Ewok on sight, but that was it.

When I finally did enter into life as a Star Wars geek, though, I did so with a vengeance. Sometime during my sophomore year of college it clicked, and now I’m one of those uber-nerds who’s no fun to play Star Wars Trivial Pursuit with (as are most of my friends – makes for very boring games. “Who wants to go first? Okay, you win.”). I’ve watched the movies a couple of zillion times, read the novels, played the role-playing game, bought a couple thousand of the CCG cards, etc., etc. I’m one of those people who knows the “stats” for the various ships and debates how actual dogfights would go. The kind of person who agonized with friends over Luke’s direct attack with the Force on the Gamorrean guards at Jabba’s Palace (“but that’s a Dark Side point!”). The kind of person who gets why the title of this post is a Star Wars reference. It’s a proud, if often poorly-dressed, club and I’m honored to name myself among its nerdly ranks.

I mention this by way of building up to (and providing a reference frame for) my thoughts about Revenge of the Sith. I’ve seen it twice now (both times on Opening Day) and I’m torn. I want to love this movie – it’s the film that ties the new trilogy and old trilogy together, a fan’s chance to see the battle that created Darth Vader in all his black-caped COPD-ish glory, the last Star Wars movie there’ll ever be (unless Lucas decides to make more, but I’d be surprised if he does) – and there is certainly a great deal there to like, but there are many things wrong with this movie, too. I’ve tried a couple of times now to put together my thoughts in a coherent review-y fashion and I find the challenge a bit much for me, so I’ll use the time-honored blogger’s cheat of making a list of my thoughts on the movie. These are the things which I found noteworthy; some good, some bad. There are quite a few spoilers, too, so if you’re hoping to see the movie sans expectations better to hold off on reading this post (and I apologize for already ruining the surprise that Vader becomes the Vader we know from episodes 4-6).

• On the upside (I want to start out with a good point about the film), it was visually spectacular. Lucas has an excellent feel for visuals and this movie – as Star Wars has since 1977 – pushed the limits of what can be done on-screen. The settings were rich and detailed, the CGI characters almost believable, and the climactic lightsaber duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan was, quite simply, awesome. On the other hand, though…

• The script, on the other hand, was awful. Really really putridly bad. Lucas’s dialogue has always been a bit clunky, but faced with the challenge of portraying complicated emotional things like going to the dark side (and all the little battles with discipline and control that entails) or developing a love story he just falls flat on his face. The Anakin/Padme love story is absolutely critical to the plot of the movie. Anakin’s love for Padme (which he’s always just sort of had – none of the three prequels have bothered to explain it any further than that – but that’s pretty common in films and not an indictment of the film unto itself) is both the one emotion he can’t control that keeps him from attaining complete Jedi focus and it’s the direct reason he voluntarily opens himself to the dark side, “nobly” accepting that any price is worth paying if it brings him the power to save her from dying in childbirth. Lucas knows that, you can tell he knows it, but he has no idea how to put it onscreen, so he settles for just having them say it over and over. Anakin talks about how he can’t lose Padme and Padme either says horrendously cheesy lines like, “Those days by the lake on Naboo, where all there was was our love,” or demands that he not shut her out. Twice during the film they have that conversation – Something’s bothering you/It’s nothing/Don’t shut me out! They don’t seem to get along very well, really – they haven’t since the big sister-little brother relationship in Phantom Menace. Makes one wonder where the deep love that will almost single-handedly bring down the Republic is. I generally find Natalie Portman quite a good actress – in fact, I think she single-handedly saves Attack of the Clones‘s love story from being similarly horrible – but there’s nothing she can do with this one. Hayden Christiansen is just in over his head. His job is to have smoldering eyes (especially at the end…) and be angry and generally look hunky, and he does those things well but none of them really forward any emotional development. It’s sort of sad, really, that Vader becomes a much better emoter in the next movie when James Earl Jones takes over the vocal acting even though he no longer has any ability to have facial expressions.

  Lucas also isn’t funny but seems to think he is. To steal an idea from Ain’t It Cool News, one line like “Boring conversation anyway” would have gone far towards saving the script. It wasn’t as horrid as the C-3PO “comedy” bits in Attack of the Clones, but still some very poor and quite forced humor.

  And while I’m discussing the script, I know that Anakin becoming evil was a foregone conclusion but still it would have been nice to have some sort of build-up to it. It’s very sudden, jarringly sudden – one minute he’s aghast at having been part of Mace Windu’s death, the next he’s off to the Jedi Temple to carve up some little kids. Some sort of transition would have been nice. In the novelization of the movie, it’s made clear that Anakin’s only able to defeat Dooku by tapping into his inner anger, which apparently he’s been fighting with for his whole life. He learns that using the pent-up rage he still carries from a childhood as a slave and from watching his mother die can bring him great power. I want to make a “great responsibility” joke here, but I’ll restrain myself.

• The characters in this movie just aren’t interesting. Lucas seems not to realize that viewers are much more interested in watching characters they like do something somewhat cool than they are in watching characters they don’t care about do something spectacular. Stephen King is an extremely rich man because he’s figured this out as a horror writer – his novel’s aren’t scary because the monster is especially icky, they’re scary because a character that you the reader are invested in is frightened. Friends became the most successful (financially, at least) sitcom ever in spite of only average writing and acting because they made people interested in the characters. Lucas doesn’t seem to get that, at least not with the three prequels. He’d rather have one-dimensional characters do visually stunning things. There isn’t a Han Solo anywhere in these prequels – no character who we’re really interested in seeing develop and grow. Instead we have Anakin, whose whole character is to be moody and act like a petulant teen. We have Palpatine, who should be a fascinating character but just becomes weird and annoying as soon as he reveals himself as Darth Sidious (I actually heard someone gasp with surprise in the theater when he told Anakin he was a Sith Lord. I hope it was sarcastic). The closest we get is Obi-Wan, and that largely due to Ewan McGregor’s exceptional work.
• Swinging back to a positive, the story itself is very good – better than the story of the orginal trilogy. The way Palpatine manipulates himself into Emperorship (that arc carries over all three movies), the don’t-mess-with-prophecy plotline that sends Anakin to the dark side, the Chosen One prophecy, and the Clone Wars themselves (which are just part of the aforementioned Who Wants To Be An Emperor? plot) – all very good and very nicely intertwined. For all his staggering weakness as a scriptwriter, there’s no denying Lucas’s genius as an idea man.
• The very odd way Lucas ignored realism – particularly as it applies to time – bothered me a great deal. I’m willing to accept basically any premise in the realm of science fiction or fantasy, but I find inconsistency within that premise very annoying. Starships that travel the galaxy? Okay. Mysterious Force that allows people to have amazing powers? No problem. Sound transmission in outer space? You betcha. But once your framework is established, stick to it, for Pete’s sake! Star Wars has established that hyperspace travel isn’t instantaneous. The Millenium Falcon is renowned for her speed, and yet there’s time for people to hang out, play some holo-chess, and generally be cool on the Tatooine-Alderaan route. Anakin and Padme have time to kick it in the cargo hold of their freighter on the way from Coruscant to Naboo. And yet in this movie Lucas ignores that and has Coruscant (the capitol planet where the Senate offices and Jedi Temple are located) and Mustafar (the volcanic planet where Anakin and Obi-Wan throw down – which is clearly stated to be on the Outer Rim – half a galaxy away from Coruscant) located close enough that travel’s basically instant. After Palpatine senses Anakin’s in trouble (which is after he’s had his legs cut off and started to catch fire from the red hot molten magma), he hops in his shuttle and is at Mustafar in time to save him. That kind of breakdown in consistency drives me nuts. Also, the whole film seems to take place over maybe a couple of weeks, and yet when Anakin hugs Padme early in the film he apparently doesn’t notice that she’s almost full-term pregnant with twins. I know guys are stereotypically unperceptive, but that seems a bit much.
• There’s also weak continuity with the old trilogy. I know that’s unavoidable to a degree, but it still grates. In Return of the Jedi, Luke asks Leia if she remembers her mother and she replies, “Just a little bit. She died when I was very young.” The second part is so very true – she dies when Leia’s minutes old – that the first part seems implausable at best. Also Lucas’s decision to make R2-D2 and C-3PO part of the prequels (an inexplicable decision at best) opens up all sorts of questions. Why doesn’t Obi-Wan remember them when he meets them again in A New Hope? Where do Artoo’s jet boosters go? In Revenge of the Sith he takes on 2 super-battle droids himself; where does that combat ability go? Now that we know that Yoda is the galaxy’s premiere lightsaber warrior, why doesn’t he just go with Luke in The Empire Strikes Back? Was the entire Kashyyyk scene put in just so we could meet Chewbacca a little bit early? Since Vader knows Beru and Owen Lars and it’s been made clear that (at least early on) he still feels a great deal of attachment to his old life, is it really unlikely that he might come back to visit his mother’s grave and note with surprise that the blond-haired kid on his way to Toshi Station for power converters has his old last name? These are all little things, but many of them would have been avoidable if the droids hadn’t been in the prequels and Anakin hadn’t been originally from Tatooine. There are some very cool nods to the old movies – Bail Organa and Yoda coming through the same door onthe Tantive that Vader would later stride through on Tantive IV (the blockade runner captured at the beginning of A New Hope) was a neat scene. Obi-Wan picking up Anakin’s lightsaber as he leaves so that he can give it to Luke in A New Hope was a neat scene. The Death Star framework with a young Tarkin standing there was a neat scene. Creating an entire scene so that Yoda can say the word “Chewbacca” was lame. Having Padme name the babies with her dying breaths was lame – anyone who couldn’t pick up on who the kids were over the course of the six movies needs a good old-fashioned dope slap anyway.
• There’s some forced (no pun intended) awkwardness because of the transition to the old trilogy, too. Not as big a deal, but while I’m ranting I’ll go ahead and mention it. Obi-Wan and Yoda obviously have to leave and go into hiding so that things can wait for the old movie gang to show up, but still it’s pretty hard to defend within the framework of the film. “The Galaxy needs us now more than ever! Quick, let’s go build huts!”
• I read the novel before I saw the film, and perhaps that affected my enjoyment level – took away any suspense and made it harder to get lost in the film. I don’t know. There are certainly some things better explained in the book than on the screen, though. For instance, the reason Anakin is so thrown when he’s told he won’t be a Master is that he’s already learned about Darth Plagueis and his ability to forestall death. He wants access to the Jedi records to learn this secret for himself, but only Masters can study records of Sith Lords. He sees being a Master as a way to save Padme – his driving ambition through the whole movie – and when that’s suddenly pulled away from him he snaps. He’s not (entirely) just being a whiny little kid who thinks he’s cool enough for the big-boys table. For instance, Dooku is betrayed by Palpatine; his battle with Anakin is just a way for Palpatine to put Anakin into a fight where he needs to tap into his anger to win. Dooku thinks he’s going to help bring Anakin to the dark side. For instance, the reason that the Jedi Council sends away Yoda – their most powerful Master – on a mission to Kashyyyk is to try to lure out Darth Sidious. (And to let Yoda say, “Chewbacca.” Grrr…) For instance, the entire reason the Clone Wars were fought was so that Palpatine could have at his command an army of clones to attack the Jedi; clones have no emotions about their orders, so there’s no warning for the Jedi to pick up on. For instance, the reason Yoda runs away from Palpatine is that he suddenly figures out the secret to defeating the Sith (this time he had it, and he knew it was right and that no one would need to be nailed to a tree…) and knows that if he loses the secret will die with him. Since he’s losing already he runs off instead.
• And finally, this may be a nitpick-ish point, but I’m stunned and aghast and amazed and even a little surprised that they didn’t get James Earl Jones to do Vader’s voice. Certainly plenty disappointed. The entire Kashyyyk storyline could have been scrapped to clear up budget room, if need be. All they had to do to make Vader’s first lines sound like the Vader we grew up with was have him phone in three or four sentences; instead we get a Vader that sounds like someone wearing one of those voice-modulating plastic masks. I have to assume that Jones was unavailable or (perish the thought) unwilling; Lucas went to such over-the-top lengths to include every tie-in to the old trilogy he possibly could, including having the same actors inside the R2-D2 and Chewbacca costumes. I could even have forgiven the Principal Skinner “Nnnoooooooooo!!” if it had just been Vader’s voice doing the no-ing.

So what do I think overall? I think that there are enough significant flaws in the film that if it wasn’t a Star Wars flick I’d probably dislike it quite a bit. But the fact that it is a Star Wars film, and that it tells a bunch of very significant story bits about characters I’m quite invested in, brings it back up quite a bit for me. It’s a bad movie, but it’s a bad movie with the Force and with lightsaber battles and with Anakin becoming Vader and scored by John Williams and that makes it a much less bad movie. Of the six Star Wars films, I’d say it’s second from the bottom – not nearly as much Jar Jar as Phantom Menace saves it from last place. But I’ll still buy it when the six movies finally all come out on DVD, and I’ll sit down with my friends and we’ll watch all 13 hours of the movies and we’ll try to get lost again in the galaxy long ago and far, far away.