We've done all our market research and our findings show
Maribeth's brother Paul, his advertising partner Andy, and his girlfriend Sara-Jo came out to Los Angeles this weekend. Paul and Andy have an internship working on the Toyota account at Saatchi and Saatchi, which even made the
Chicago Sun-Times (the last item at the bottom).
Meanwhile we had a marketing crisis of our own: maybe the Golem Group will be confused with GermanAutoParts.com! What do you think?
We have to install microwave ovens
There's something odd going on in our kitchen: the microwave oven heats up the bowls much more than it heats up the food inside the bowl. We wind up with coldish food inside a bowl that's too hot to touch.
This is not something I recall experiencing before. I'm not sure if our current bowls are unusually microwave-absorptive, or if our current microwave oven radiates at a particular absorbing frequency for ceramic.
Because of a completely unrelated topic, I was searching through the RAND library today and found this 1962 paper by Marvin Schaffer:
The Thermal Response of Small Animals to Microwave Irradiation.
If kerosene works why not gasoline
We went back for more Peckinpah:
The Wild Bunch. We didn't stay for the second feature,
The Killer Elite, because the intermission panel didn't exactly talk it up. "I think the first twenty minutes of
The Killer Elite is brilliant, but then you see that pieces are missing..."
The panel complained about the fact that one of the screenwriters of
The Killer Elite insisted on having his wife cast as the female lead. According to the IMDB, at this time the screenwriter was about 58, and his wife was 15 years old.
While watching
The Wild Bunch, I kept thinking of Sam Peckinpah's
Salad Days as interpreted by Monty Python.
At one point the Wild Bunch encounters an automobile, apparently for the first time. "What's that thing? Does it run on steam?" "No... on alcohol, or gasoline." But if you weren't familiar with automobiles, would you know what gasoline was?
Well, Wikipedia says that pre-automotive gasoline was sold in small bottles as a delousing agent. I guess it's plausible that the Wild Bunch might have been familiar with gasoline as a means of setting fire to buildings.
Only just a dreamboat sailing in my head
Somehow or other I read
"The Faery Handbag" by
Kelly Link online, and I liked it enough that I bought her book
Magic for Beginners when I saw it in the bookstore.
Also, I remember some weeks ago I heard some writer being interviewed on NPR and telling the interviewer about her fascination with zombies. In hindsight this person was probably Kelly Link (cf. "Some Zombie Contingency Plans") but I was not thinking of this at the time I bought the book.
I have mixed feelings about this collection of stories. They all have this dreamlike, magical realism vibe and I think all the individual sentences and paragraphs and whole pages are very well written. But somewhere above the length scale of one page, the stories, dreamlike, become incoherent. "The Faery Handbag" is not quite representative, since of all the stories in the collection, it has the most normal story structure and doesn't leave you wondering what the hell happened at the end.
It's reminiscent of the way some other extremely talented writers (e.g. Stephen King, Neal Stephenson) have trouble writing good endings. In Kelly Link's case, the stories tend to end just by turning up the surreality knob a couple of notches. Then the plasticine porter loads your luggage into the fricking newspaper taxi and you float off into the sunset.
On the plus side,
"Magic for Beginners", the title story in the collection, does feature a character whose hair is infested with "miniature, wicked, fire-breathing golems."
You can kill them in the classic style
We went to see a double feature of Sam Peckinpah's
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and
Ride the High Country. In between the two features they had a Q&A session with David Weddle (Peckinpah biographer), Gordon Dawson (writer/producer of
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia), and Mariette Hartley (female lead of
Ride the High Country).
Towards the end of
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Bennie brings la cabeza de Alfredo Garcia to the men who will pay him ten thousand dollars for it. So far in the course of getting the head about a dozen people have been killed. One of the men says, "Helluva job, Bennie."
This line gets a different audience response today than it probably did before 2005.
She is electric, can I be electric too?
We went for a walk in Los Feliz. In particular we walked by the Ennis-Brown House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It is huge and meant to look like a Mayan temple. Like many things designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it is falling apart. So it looks like a ruined Mayan temple. The entrance was boarded up with a sign saying "Beware of the Dog."
Apparently this house was where Harrison Ford's character Deckard lived in
Blade Runner. And I do vaguely recall the Mayan design in
Blade Runner, but wasn't Deckard living in an apartment? Wasn't there an elevator?
It was pretty hot to be doing all this walking around, so we stopped for some overpriced lemonade at Fred 62, and then on a whim we went into the movie theater across the street and saw
Who Killed the Electric Car?I liked the movie. It is a biased, one-sided account: for example, the movie never says how much the EV1 would actually cost to buy, it just skewers GM for not letting people buy them and not making them cheaper. And at the end, it shows you the
Tzero and tells you a Tzero with lithium-ion batteries has a range of 300 miles at 70 miles per hour, without also mentioning that the target price for a Tzero is between that of a Porsche and a Ferrari. But despite this, I thought it was a good movie.
You say John I say Wayne, Hot dog I say cool it man, I don't wanna be the President of America
We went to the farmer's market this morning, then walked down to the beach. And who should ride past us on the bike path? It was the Governor on his bicycle taking his morning exercise.
He was wearing sunglasses. Sunglasses conceal the identity of other people, but on the Governor, they just make him more recognizable.
I think there should be a classification system for celebrity close encounters, like the one for UFOs. A celebrity close encounter of the first kind would be if you encounter them in the course of their celebrity duties, like at a book signing. A celebrity encounter of the second kind would be if you see them walking down the street or in line at the Starbucks. And an encounter of the third kind would be if you're trapped with them in an ATM vestibule and share a stick of gum or something.
