Month: March 2003

Laziness

John Winkelman

Weeellll This evening I got off my lazy, inconsiderate ass and added content to Master Lee’s Website . I realized part-way into the work that some of the pages needed sub-navigation. Fortunately the design – created by the inebriated inestimable Bock – left room for such a thing, almost as if he anticipated the need.

I got my geek on this weekend with a movie and a comic book. The movie was Donnie Darko , which was all about angst and time travel and demonic rabbits. Okay, I may have over-simplified it a little, but it was a suspense movie of a flavor not entirely unlike PI . I highly recommend it.

The comic book, or “graphic novel”, if you will, was the collected first six issues of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. The reviewers at Amazon (follow the link) do a much better job of pimping this than I ever could; suffice it to say that I was hooked on page 2.

And last but not least, I am slowly putting together a page of useful design and development tools, which can be had for free at various places on the internet. It is linked in to the right, in the middle of the Library section.

Outside

John Winkelman

I spent several hours today on a ladder drilling holes in a house, in anticipation of a day of blowing several bales of shredded paper into the walls for insulation. This was something I did for a friend in exchange for wood-fired pizza. I think I get the better end of the deal. How often does someone say “You want to come over and drill holes in my house”

Working in front of a computer for so many hours a week, I sometimes forget the simple pleasure of a day of hard manual labor. Far from being a wasted weekend day, today was relaxing and refreshing. I saw a couple of friends I haven’t seen in several months, and a couple of others whom I see every week, but seldom have the chance to talk to.

I have been sick most of this past week, which is fine, because the weather has been…not so great. I have made headway on my stack of books, including over a hundred pages of This Cold Heaven, by Gretel Ehrlich, which is a travel narrative about Greenland, by a poet who was once struck by lightning. It is a fine, fine read.

Current Events

John Winkelman

On NPR this morning were sound-bite interviews with several man-on-the-street types regarding the current war in Iraq. The opinions fell distinctly into two categories: America Love It Or Leave It, and Down With the American Hegemony. The opinions of the country currently seem to run the entire spectrum between these two extremes.

I propose some lateral thinking. I say that it is not “America” that is involved in the war; rather it is “The Administration”. It is often overlooked that the country and the people running it are very seldom one and the same. Think about it: America has been around as a country for just shy of 227 years. The Bush administration has been around for just over two. In three more years, America will still be here and Bush will be back to jerking off on the electric chair.

I love my country a great deal; I can’t imagine that living anywhere else would be an improvement. This is why it pisses me off so much that my employee George W Bush is trying so hard to fuck it up for so many people. He is on track to rile up the rest of the world, get them pissed at us, then when he inevitably loses the next election, the next president will be caught in a shitstorm not of his own making.

I did a little reading about Saddam. The guy is as bad as Stalin ever was, and the world will be better off without him. That is not why we are at war. I have stated it before and will continue to state it until Bush Who I Regret I Pay With My Taxes admits as much: this is exactly and only about oil rights. It is a power grab by The Administration which labors under the ludicrous assumption that the USA belongs to them. The members of the administration only have as much power as we give them, and I get the feeling we have given them too much. There are too many appointees and too few elected officials. The gap between man-on-the-street and bureaucrat has widened to an unacceptable degree.

If any of you are involved in protests I say this: don’t turn your anger on the people who are involved in the actual fighting. They have a terribly hard job to do, and they need all the support they can get. They are Americans to be proud of. The despicable ones are the decision makers who brought this war about in the first place. The ones who tell other people to go out and die, without doing it themselves.

And we should leave off the French-bashing. They showed a lot of balls by not toeing the line with the US. French-bashing may be fun and amusing for the inbred rednecks which make up so much of America, but it distracts us from issues like the blatant over-ruling of so much of the constitution and bill of rights in the name of “security” and “patriotism”.

Peace out.

Changing States

John Winkelman

For the second day in a row Scott and I were in the right place at the right time. Today as we were walking along the river all of the ice between the 6th Street Bridge and the Leonard Street bridge (about a quarter-mile of river) let go and thundered over the dam.

river_melt_3

It was quite impressive. Some of the pieces were more than twenty feet across and about a foot thick, and must have weighed well over a ton.

river_melt_4

The entire ice pack took half an hour or so to clear the dam. The turbulence at the foot was filled with huge ice chunks and tree trunks and old shoes and pop bottles and a single soccer ball. The local ducks like to camp out at the top of the fish ladder and some of them were doing small-scale reinterpretations of the Titanic, getting bumped around and generally pushed toward the dam. A heart-stopping moment occurred when a duck hopped up on one of the ice floes just before it want over, but the duck took to the air in plenty of time to escape.

Sooner or later one of them will be a little slow on the uptake and Grand Rapids will find itself a duck short.

Different Seasons

John Winkelman

The upper river has been frozen since mid-December. Sometimes the ice creeps back from the edge of the dam. Sometimes the ice hangs over the edge of the dam. Scott and I contemplated walking across the river, but couldn’t quite work up the nerve. Something about river ice seems inherently less trustworthy than, say, lake ice.

This is what the river has looked like for most of the past three months:

river_melt_0

Yup. That was pretty much it, up until this past Friday. The warm weather has been melting the ice at an extraordinary rate. This is what the dam looked like yesterday at around 6:00 pm:

river_melt_1

About eight inches of water going over the dam. The ice was still touching the shore up by the 6th Street Bridge. Fishermen were braving the still frigid water and dodging the occasional chunks of ice.

At about 1:00 pm today the weight of the backed-up ice pushed a couple of trees over the dam, which had been hung up at the top for a couple of years. Scott and I had been saying for a long time “Wouldn’t it be cool…” and we finally got to see it. As he said, we deserved to see it.

At 5:30 pm today, this is what the dam looked like:

river_melt_2

When the ice and the trees gave way there was a mad scramble as the fishermen sought shelter in the rocks and shallows.

By tomorrow morning the rest of the ice will probably have let go for the year and the river will be running high, and the fishermen will be pulling salmon out by the barrel-full.

Happy birthday, Virginia.

Happy St. Patrick’s day.

Lamb

John Winkelman

This afternoon Virginia and I went to Sami’s for gyros. After the initial feeding frenzy, in which I lost the tip of my pinky finger, we traded gyro stories. Actually, it was less a trade and more of her listening to me while she ate.

I had my first gyro in Gorky Park in Moscow, in June of 1994. This was at the tail end of a six week class excursion to Russia, and the bunch of us were dirty, sleep-deprived, suffering from mild alcohol poisoning, and loving every minute of it.

The day was overcast and spitting rain, and the park was mostly empty, except for the carnies. Boy, if you think American carnies are scary, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We didn’t dare go on any of the rides; by Cedar Point standards they didn’t look like that much fun and we had a healthy distrust of Russian safety measures. The latrines were the most frightening experience of my life. They made my eyes water from a hundred yards UPWIND.

Just off of a smaller path a ways away from the river two Azerbaijani gentlemen had a small kiosk set up with a home-made rotisserie grill thing and a small strongbox. On the rotisserie was a big hunk of sheep meat. After days of sparse sack lunches and shoe-leather stew, the site of so much fresh meat sent us into a slavering frenzy of waiting in line for the sheep to finish cooking. The twenty minutes felt like an eternity. Every movement of an Azerbaijani arm left a vapor trail and the glint of sunlight from gold teeth was blinding.

Finally they were preparing my gyro. Several thin slices of lamb on pita bread, with a cucumber sause and fresh crushed parsley. To this day, I remember it as one of the best meals of my life.