Killing Joke

You Coward, You Servant, You Blind Man.

2011-12-10T16:33:00.011-05:00

Allow me to open with how this has been a particularly difficult post to finish. I don't mean it was emotionally trying, or intellectually hard to get my head around, rather that I've written it up three or four times now and just couldn't get it to come out in a style I liked while still conveying what it was I was trying to say. I wrote my first draft, which by now bears at best a passing resemblance to this post, back on Memorial Day, for reasons that should become fairly clear as I progress. At any rate, it's finally done and polished enough so here we go.

I've been thinking a lot over the past several months on the subject of heroes. This should come as a surprise to precisely no one who's up on what I've been doing lately, so for those who aren't, a bit of background is necessary at this point. Since completing my comps back in May and spending, well, most of the summer in a non-academic coma recovering from the whole experience, I have since gotten to work on forming up what I want to do for my dissertation. During the whole reading process I did last year, there were any number of interesting things I came across that begged for further examination, but the one in particular I've decided to go with fits quite well into my particular field of study: International and comparative history with a focus on war, defeat, and aftermath.

What I'm very slowly getting around to revealing here is that I've discovered a phenomenon which I'd previously thought to be exclusively American to have occurred previously in other nations as well. I am speaking here of the myth of the secret camp, an outgrowth of POW/MIA advocacy. The American version of the myth, which anyone who lived through the 80s should instantly recognize from any one of a plethora of bad action movies, holds that some/all of the roughly 1600 American servicemen still unaccounted from the war in Vietnam are, rather than just being corpses no one ever recovered, being held in secret camps by the evil Vietnamese communists. Think Rambo: First Blood Pt. II, for just one of many examples.

In the process of reading all those books during the 2010 - 2011 academic year, I came across two previous instances of the myth, in two different countries: France immediately after the Great War, and West Germany following the Second World War. In both instances, popular movements arose following their respective wars which argued that their MIAs (over a quarter of a million in the case of France) were not, in fact, dead, but rather being held (in the French instance) being held by the sinister Huns or (in ther German one) by the nefarious Soviets for various cartoonishly-villainous reasons.

As in the American version of the myth, both of these have their basis virtually entirely in a poisonous mixture of wishful thinking, unreasoning hope, and leftover wartime resentment and political ideology. I'm obviously still in the process of researching how two of the three (the German and American, and I can't read French) versions compare with one another, but one thing has struck me about the two that is shaping up to be one of my core arguments, and why (at long last) I've been thinking about heroes quite a bit lately. It all has its roots in the two wars in question, and how the nations I'm examining dealt with them; it's hardly controversial to say that World War II, particularly on the Eastern Front, and the Vietnam War were dirty* wars, ones which their respective populaces struggled afterwards to find anything positive to salvage from the experiences. For both, their returning servicemen did not make particularly useful hero figures, the Germans as their soldiers were compromised by the atrocities of the Nazi state, no matter how much generals in high places tried to argue the Wehrmacht had fought its war with clean hands, and the Americans due both to the humiliation of a lost war and also by how fundamentally it had wrought social division and unrest at home.

POWs, however, are a different story. Time spent behind the wire, in both cases usually enduring privation and brutality either in Siberia or the Hanoi Hilton, was seen by both Germans and Americans as redemptive. Any wartime sins committed by those individuals were washed clean by captivity, by the experience of nobly if passively resisting the communist captor. And so, to make an already fairly lengthy story short, it's had me thinking about how societies denominate their heroes.

This isn't the first time I've given the subject some thought, but I've not been able to articulate my thoughts on the subject coherently until this research gave me the lens through which to do so. Consider how often, currently, you hear the word "hero" get tossed around. During the last dozen years or so I've found myself, if only on the subconscious level, get a bit leery whenever I hear someone labelled a hero, and I think I've finally figured out why: We do it too frequently.

This is where I get into the section that's likely to offend someone, so I'd preemptively apologize, if that was the sort of thing I did. Which it isn't. It strikes me that, in America today, basically anyone wearing a uniform is presumed a hero by default. Think of, well, basically any political figure or commentator speaking about the armed forces; can you recall a single instance where, at least once, American servicemen and -women get called "our heroes?" I sure can't, and I frankly, I have to wonder about the consequences of such a blanket assignation. After all, if anyone who does a hitch in the military is a hero, then how do we judge actual acts of genuine heroism, whether in the service or not? Inversely, if they're collectively all "our heroes," then where does that put someone like Lynndie England, or any other given war criminal that comes along?

Hell, I don't even need to dial up the rhetoric that high; is there the same equivalence of heroism between a marine that did a hitch during the battle of Fallujah and a sailor in the Naval Reserve that never left Newport News? I can't shake the feeling that by blanket-assigning everyone in the service as being heroes by default, we're irreparably cheapening the very concept of heroism. To say nothing of how obviously pandering are so many who, at the drop of a hat, bust out the "our heroes" line.

However, I'm most troubled by how much more frequently I've been hearing it since the inauguration of Iraq and Afghanistan. I'll grant that the beginning of a war is likely to crank the patriotic rhetoric up a notch or two, all other consideration excepted, but then my mind wanders back to those West Germans after 1945, or Americans after (let's say) 1973.

Are we really thanking heroes, or are we just trying to salvage something positive out of otherwise-tarnished situations?

*Just to get this potentially nightmarish complication out the way: all wars are dirty to one degree or another, and anyone claiming that one side or another in any war fought it with clean hands should be immediately suspected of advancing an agenda rather than being honest with history. All that said, for the purposes of this discussion, I think it's safe to say Germany in the Second World War and the US in Vietnam were notably dirtier wars than usual, though clearly not equally so.

Stunde Null

2011-05-19T22:42:00.003-04:00

This is going to be a fairly self-indulgent, so if you're not looking for me to narrowly focus in on my recent life then best move on. If you are, they read on.

As should be entirely obvious to anyone who's been paying attention to this or anything else I've said for the past few years, I'm currently attending graduate school to earn a doctorate in history. A little over a week ago, I passed an important milestone in my progress towards that degree: my comprehensive exam. I mentioned last time that this was sorta a big deal with not inconsiderable prep work going into it; it's honestly hard to exaggerate just how much you have to do to get ready. While I read a few books last summer, I only really got going last September. But, I already bored and frustrated you last time with the rundown of how the exam goes, and so refrain from doing so a second time.

The test itself commenced on 3 May. The way we do it here at SUNY Albany is you're admitted to a small, windowless room, in which you have a laptop on which to answer the questions asked. You're allowed scratch paper to jot down ideas or, more commonly, as much of your book list as you can remember for future reference, and that's about it. My first professor, coincidentally my committee chair, had me answer three questions out of four in the three hours I had for his written section; all the others had me just choose two out of four, and unsurprisingly I was able to write much more extensively for them, not that I feel I did bad on my first. After each morning session I got a one hour break for lunch before taking on the next one. It's hard to describe for anyone who hasn't done it, or something roughly similar like, say, the bar exam, just how intense an experience it is. Three hours grinding away on two-three questions, writing like your life depends on it. I averaged about eleven-twelve pages for each professor, which taken together means I wrote about a forty four-page exam in the space of twelve hours.

I don't know if this is standard for all universities and suspect it probably is not, but my department at least leaves it up to the student in question to determine his/her own schedule for their test, and as such I elected to take a day off after my written exams before I faces the final bit, the oral examination. The time just to get my equilibrium back was key; I think I might've looked over the answers I'd given in the written for maybe fifteen minutes, the rest of that day was entirely, gloriously, unproductive. I watched some TV, played a video game at one point, and tried (mostly successfully) to not second guess myself or get massively freaked out about the final session to come.

That's not to say that I wasn't feeling some butterflies when, the next morning, I headed up to the department seminar room to face my committee. The parking lot is on the far side of the building from the office so I found myself with a long walk down the hallway to get there, which was frankly a borderline-surreal experience. It's singular; you're afflicted of that simultaneous feeling of anticipation and worry, coupled with the knowledge that you're about to face the moment, win or lose, live or die, and each step brings it that much closer.

And then, it starts. The actual questioning is a half hour per professor, and despite what experience I have in stage performing and public speaking it's still remarkable how quickly the time goes by. In practice each went pretty well; I got tripped up once or twice on authors I couldn't recall precisely or arguments that had fallen by the wayside. I parried the thrusts, engaged with the historiography, and generally kept my head above water for the full two hours.

Afterwards, they have you step out while they discuss among themselves your performance. It was, I think, maybe seven or eight minutes, but was so amped up at that point I doubt I recall it accurately. My suspicion is they took about thirty seconds to all agree I'd passed and the rest to just let me stew in my own juices.

I doubt I'm leaving anyone on tenterhooks here to only at this point reveal that I ended up passing, as in fact I did. That weekend ended up being a whirlwind of drunken excess in celebration of so doing and also being free of any pressing obligation on my time. Massive hangovers are worth it, every now and again.

Lurker at the Threshold

2011-04-26T23:05:00.002-04:00

This is going to come off a bit self-interested, compared with my last post but frankly I'm so far from the point of caring I don't even remember what it looked like on my way past. Yesterday I finished the last book I had to read for my PhD candidacy exam, also known as the comprehensive exam or comps, for short. For those of you not so mentally derang- errr, properly motivated to consider going to graduate school, allow me to point out what a goddamn task it's been getting from there to here.

I don't know how representative this will be outside of my particular discipline of history, but I've reason to believe within the humanities at least it's roughly representative. Coursework, the actual taking of classes that is, generally takes about four semesters; I came in with a MA already so I had advanced standing of 30 credits granted from the work I'd already done, meaning I had a mere 36 more to earn. Anyway, once you've got that complete the big hurdle to advance from PhD grad student to PhD candidate is your comps, a massive exam to make sure you've got the requisite knowledge in the field to be a professor yourself one day. You pick four professors within a set of requirements of which I'll not bore you and they each assign you forty books to read, from which each can essentially ask you anything they like; at 160 books, wise students take at least two semesters to get through this process. I started mine in early September 2010, and concluded last night.

The rule of thumb is to try to knock off a book a day, which is both worse and less bad than it sounds; on days when you've got a short little 120 pager which reads easy you feel like a god. When it's a 500+ page bit of dense New History crap from the 1960s you doubt your fitness not only as a grad student but also as a basic human and contemplate instead joining the French Foreign Legion. It's really hard to describe to someone who hasn't done it just how physically tiring it is to sit and do nothing but read a book and take notes on it for eight to ten hours a day, day after day, week after week.

Anyway, the end now is in sight. I've got a week from today, exactly, before day one of my test. The exam itself is split into two parts, written and oral, the latter of which I'd normally not be above making a juvenile joke about but can't find it in me to do so. Over the first two days, you have four three-hour sessions in each of which your professors in sequence ask you a number of questions about, well, basically anything they like from the books you read for them. It goes without saying you're expected to be able to cite author and book to back up whatever it is you have to say, for each, out of any of the 160 books you had to read. Following that, there's a third day where in the space of two hours, each professor gets a half hour in which to grill you extemporaneously. Usually but not always this is to either fill in blanks from the written session or force you to take a position on some pet peeve/crusade of theirs.

In sum total, it comes to fourteen hours total of exam. It's closed book, of course. Mine starts in a little under one week from today. Wheeeeeeee....

The Secretary of War Regrets to Inform You

2011-03-21T22:26:00.003-04:00

It should surprise precisely no one that I've a weakness for gallows humor and a morbid streak at least a mile wide. That combined with being a student of the history of war, particularly the incomparably bloody wars of the 20th Century, I tend to spend an awful lot of time reading about people dying, often at factory warehouse rates since I've been in hardcore study mode recently for my upcoming Comprehensive Exam in May. One of the many benefits of this, besides a constant low-level insanity, is that I've finally been able to puzzle out the particulars of a problem of language.

It all bears down on how people speak of the event of death. Specifically, two phrases that have rubbed me the wrong way for about as long as I can remember: "he lost his life" and "he gave his life." I've never liked either phrase, but haven't until very recently been able to put to words exactly why. Let's start with "he lost his life;" what it boils down to is I dislike the separation this implies between a person and the state of being alive, as if life is some subordinate property to personhood which can be lose without invaliding the existence of the individual, that somehow the person continues in an insubstantial but non-metaphorical way after having died. Atheist that I am, using such a linguistic convention strikes me as just another way in which superstitionist thinking is granted special social privilege.

There's another element too, which that phrase has in common with the second phrase, "he gave his life." This one's much closer to my profession of choice; having read so many and varied accounts of wartime atrocity and death, I'm more and more convinced that it is an exceedingly rare individual indeed that actually, consciously "gives" his life for any cause. In virtually every case, with only a very few exceptions, no one make a choice either conscious or otherwise to die in service of a cause; to risk death, sure, but from what I've been able to tell to a man they tend to think that they'll be the one who survives, the one who beats the odds and makes it back covered in glory, that it'll be poor Kowalski down the line that gets plugged, not them.

And yet so often they're wrong, and it's left for those of us still breathing to commemorate or at least comment. With markedly few exceptions, it's far more accurate to say something like "while scared half out of his mind, he got his head blown off by a sniper," or "in a village that was supposed to have been cleared, his stepped on a mine and spent ten agonizing minutes thrashing around on ragged stumps before bleeding to death," or if we wish to be mercifully brief, just "he was lost/died/got killed." This whole "he gave his life" business strikes me as needlessly romanticizing an ugly, brutal affair and puffing it up into something so damned heroic (regardless of actual events) that the simpler minded among us might secretly hope that when they end comes, they too would die as well as our erstaz-hero of the moment. There's something tragic going on here as well; by resorting to "he gave his life," instead of something more honest, the speaker of such a trite phrase not only retreats from the truth of the event but also cheapens the reality of the dead person's final experience down to the equivalent of a jingoistic Hallmark card.

It can hardly be an accident that those who purport to care so deeply about these deaths choose to use such shallow, self-interested language to describe it.

Hope is the First Step on the Road to Disappointment

2010-12-19T19:22:00.003-05:00

It occurs to me that given the title, you could surmise I'm about to go into how some hope of mine has died lately, or that I've sunken into crippling depression or something. If so, take some relief (or frustration, if you're one of the growing number lusting after my demise) that neither is the case. It's just that, being the end of the year where the airwaves fill as always with the saccharine schmaltz of Christmas music, enjoyed exclusively by blabbering simpletons and the borderline autistic, I felt the need to serve as antipodes to the manufactured merriment in which the twits who make up the majority in this country seem to think it's mandatory to indulge. So worry not, I'm feelin' fine, though if pressed I'll admit that I've a growing suspicion that things are soon to go very, very badly for those who's vicinity I often find myself, and that may well darken my day. Here's hoping I'm wrong.

I'll admit it; I have grown boring of late. Any given day for the past four months I spend basically any free time I have reading for my comps, which are tentatively scheduled for May, trying to knock off about a book a day. So if asked what I'm up to or how I've been, it's been pretty easy to answer as that answer hasn't changed since September: reading, tired, and shut the hell up I told you I was going to be like this the last damn time you asked.

It's possible I've grown marginally more profane as well in my perpetual weariness, now that you mention it.

I have a hard time describing to any of my non-academic friends how exhausting it is to just sit and read intensively for eight-ten hours at a stretch; for an activity that requires no actual movement beyond turning pages and taking notes, you end up remarkably worn out at the end. But hey, I knew this would be the case when I signed up for this gig, and I only have to do it (hopefully) once. Then, it's off to the magical land of ABD, where if other grad students are any example, I can drag on dissertation research basically indefinitely (presuming the funding situation in this lousy state improves).

I could easily go on a long, obscenity-laced tirade at this point about how the recent budget cuts at SUNY Albany are further evidence of our president's obviously drug-addled brain, and indicative not only of that impairment but also strongly suggest he spends far too much time practicing oral sex on large, unhygienic farm animals, but I'll spare you for the moment and leave off with just reasserting that University President George Philip is a no-good motherfucker.

Yep, definitely have gotten more profane.

Mandatory Bonus Duties

2010-03-05T23:05:00.002-05:00

Been a long couple of weeks; the professor of the course I'm TA for this semester has been out sick since the 23rd of February and I've had to take the lectures. The class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays, which wouldn't have been all that big a deal except each time I had maybe a half a day to prep, not knowing until that point whether the professor would be back or not. Complicating this as well was the small matter of the undergrads having just completed one exam (and wanting to bitch about their richly-deserved grades) and the second one approaching soon (and so they wished to bitch about that too).

I'm being unfair, I know; the overwhelming majority of the students who've come into my office hours or approached me after class are motivated by an earnest desire to do better and understand why they didn't do as well as they'd like on previous assignments. However, there are as always the small minority of self-entitled shitheads who just want to hear that yes they were correct all along and oh how woefully mistaken I, the other TA, or Professor was to assign them anything other than a full A. Not sure how I avoided these douchebags last semester, frankly, but hey if they want to go over my head to complain to the professor more power to them; he's even more legendarily grumpy and ill-tempered than I, believe it or not.

All that taken together I've had barely enough time to stay prepared for my own course work. Thankfully I've had no papers due, just the usual weekly readings and such, but still there's been far more skimming done than I like these recent days. On the one hand life in academia requires a ton of off the clock reading and studying, mollycoddling students who are in over their heads, and generally near-constant effort to keep all the chainsaws in the air, but on the other the pay totally sucks too!

This is the Winter of our Discount Tent

2010-01-31T22:27:00.004-05:00

I gotta say that so far, Albany isn't impressing me much by way of winter weather. Sure, this isn't Buffalo or Rochester or anything, but technically we are in upstate New York and the locals have been talking it up. Having grown up in the back beyond of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom I'm normally required by law to sneer at anyone* claiming to suffer from tough winters but whatever, I was willing to give it a chance and see just how unpleasant things could be, but seriously we've only gotten a couple good snows and there's almost none of it left at all. And yes, there have been some pretty cold nights but nothing worse than what I went through during my time in Boston. So presuming nothing changes, I'm giving this joint an eight out of ten on the whiny-flatlander scale of climatic exaggeration.

The semester's a couple of weeks old now, my second as a doctoral student; another of my friends in the department is in the midst of her comps right now, to conclude tomorrow with her oral defense about which, classy fellow that I am, I'll leaving off making predictable jokes. The two classes I have, not counting the throwaway one-credit thing I have to take due to SUNY's byzantine method of assigning credits for grad courses, are both pretty interesting but neither looks (on first inspection at least) to be all that difficult. Of course it's only two class sessions in so who knows if I've completely misread them or not.

As to the undergrad course I'm TAing for, I'm both luckier in that I'm partnered up with another TA this time and more disadvantaged by it being a monster class with one of the strictest-grading professors in the department. Granted, that last part is more of a problem for the actual students than it is for me, but sooner or later they're likely to show up at my office hours and bitch about it.

Ah who am I kidding, no undergrads ever show up at my office hours for any reason ever.

*Allowable exceptions include Scandinavians, Russians, Alaskans, and some Canadians.

A Brave New World

2010-01-02T19:51:00.002-05:00

I don't make it a habit of doing a year's end/new year's dawn post but I believe I will for one; additionally, this was originally just going to be a semester's end thing but I somehow lacked the requisite motivation to get that done after grading finals and all. Two for the price of one, you people have never had it so good.

2009 was, by most accounts, a shitty year for just about everyone; I'm something of an outlier in that honestly, I had a pretty good year. You know what, I'm not even going to couch it that much, I had a damn good year all told. The only thing that I'd have preferred to have gone otherwise was leaving Boston, but even that's not that bad taken in context. Let's itemize things here, lest this turn into even more of a ramble than I usual indulge.

-Got accepted and, as important, funded at SUNY Albany. As previously mentioned this meant leaving beantown, which I still miss in ways, but Albany's growing on me. This is in part helped by the fact that I-

-Bought a condo, the first place I've actually owned as opposed to rented. In a perfect world, meaning one that catered to my every mad whim, it'd be closer to downtown, but it's close to campus, has two assigned parking spaces and everything works. Got a few things left to get done, curtains to put up in the upstairs rooms and this desktop to move up there once my laptop arrives, but mostly things are squared away and set up. It's also great to have actual furniture of my own for once, and not having to depend on a roommate's possessions and the few scavenged cast-offs I've had since leaving Burlington. Having my own place rules.

-Similarly, being back in grad school is awesome. Having one semester under my belt now, I can say I'm in a much better place to be doing this now than I ever was in 2004 when I started my MA work at GWU; in retrospect it's a little surprising I did as well as I did on that degree, considering how in over my head I was in a lot of ways. Then again, I'm not coming out a year-long semi-depressive heavy-drinking over-hyphenated funk this time either. So that helps.

-Possible due to not being in the position just described, I'm also done a lot better making friends with the other grad students; the ones I've got in with here at Albany are a pretty good bunch, and to be frank much closer to my type of geek. My DC friends, who I do value despite this, were honestly a bunch of squares for the most part.

-Being a TA, the other half of my grad school experience and that for which I get paid a very small amount, isn't half bad either. Sure, the undergrads are for the most part a pack of feckless idiots who rarely attend class, never come to office hours, fail to study up and still have the stones to bitch about the lousy grade the get on the exams, but it's a stepping stone towards what being a professor one day will be like and an excuse to go (slightly more) mad with (a very small increase in) power.

The particulars of how my life has been pretty good lately aside, a couple of which I've left suspiciously off of this list, I also have to comment on how happy I am as always to have the holidays behind me for another year. There wasn't anything in particular unpleasant about them, in fact I stayed back home with my parents for longer than usual this year without losing my mind or anything, but man alive is it my least favorite time of year. I think more than anything else it's the enforced merriment, the requirement that all get into the "holiday spirit," which makes life as a bitterly jaded misanthrope, well, more bitterly jaded, and not in a good way. Additionally aggravating is the annual sniping from christians and to a lesser degree pagans (due to the lower proportion of the population that ascribes to that particular laughable fiction) fighting over who's holiday it actually is, both oblivious that it belongs to Madison Avenue more now than it ever did for either of them in their respective previous periods of social relevance. Oh yeah, and the music totally sucks too; the bare handful of christmas songs I like never get played and we end up with the usual saccharine 1950s-esque horseshit as always.

Bah, I say, Bah.

Home Again, Home Again

2009-11-30T00:04:00.006-05:00

As most of those reading this know, I grew up Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, specifically in the town of Lyndon. Those who don't, likely have no idea where that is or what the NEK is. To answer the former, just check a map, and the latter is comprised of the northeastern-most three counties of Vermont: Orleans, Essex and Caledonia, within the last of these three Lyndon can be found. It's the most rural part of an exceedingly rural state and honestly I don't go back all that often as after a couple of days I start going utterly stir crazy. This likely speaks volumes on my deviant formative years.

The reason I bring this all up, other than my omnipresent tendency towards pedantry, is the just-past Thanksgiving holiday which is one of the few times I can relied upon to be back there. The drive from here in Albany was, by my reckoning, about four hours and change, owing mostly to there being no east-west interstate to speak of across all of northern New England; I ended up taking route 4 eastward to White River Junction where I91 can be picked up. I went over on Wednesday, which is something of an anomaly as the last several years I've not gone back until the day of, not the day before.

Regardless, the day itself was spent helping my father with the continuing task of clearing out my late grandmother's house up in East Burke. She died back in 2008 and ever since my father and uncle have been working on getting it cleared out and ready for sale; given that she and my grandfather (who died back in 1996 as I recall) had been living there since 1965, it's the epitome of dry understatement to say this has been something of a task. The house itself is pretty much empty at this point and I'm informed that the barn is too, leaving only a few things in the garage, wood shed, and basement to be cleared out, plus a few minor, trifling items in the yard itself. These latter object were our objective, and turned out to be the planters I'd halfway hoped had already disappeared.

Now I don't know what springs to mind when I say the word planters for you. I suspect it's something to the tune of old wooden barrels cut in half, or maybe milk cans or the like. Troublesome to move around but not hugely inconvenient once you've got all the dirt out. For me growing up (and now, obviously), planter has always indicated a giant cast iron kettle. My father, on the drive up, explained that these had been located in the partially burned-out barn behind the house he had grown up in, from which my grandparents had moved back in 1965 to this location in East Burke. Apparently, that barn had way back when, and we're talking late 19th century to early 20th here, been part of a local meat packing facility in Lyndon, and these kettles had been used for rendering down fat of one sort or another into something commercially viable (tallow, lard, etc). And well you just don't let a gigantic, heavy cast iron vat like that go to waste if you've any sort of sense, I tell you.

We were fortunate in more than one way, to be honest. While three of the four were still full of dirt it wasn't hard-packed in, or frozen or anything, and we'd had the foresight to bring appropriate shovels along as well as a prybar for the fourth which was overturned and without any means of uprighting by hand alone. There remained the task, once they were empty, of getting them up onto the trailer; though difficult, we'd determined this to fall within the realm of possible, whereas wrestling them up into the bed of the pickup itself was a pipe dream at best and two blown spinal columns at worst. Thankfully, there were a couple long steel risers my uncle Greg had left lying about that we were able to use to build a shallow ramp upon which to roll the kettles up onto the trailer, with only a minimum of grunting and straining.

These were hardly the only things salvaged, as my father had also several days beforehand rediscovered my grandfather's old beanhole, well preserved beneath it's iron cover. For those of you from so unfortunate as to be not from here, the traditional New England way to make baked beans involved leaving the bean pot in a covered fire pit (the beanhole) to simmer away for hours before uncovering come dinner time. Them flatlanders from Boston and thereabouts tend to use molasses in the sauce but up north we use maple syrup more often than not. Both my parents and grandparents have/had beanholes, but my grandfather's puts my dad's to shame. For one, he had an actual iron cover for it, which I suspect had been a manhole cover in its first life. The real kicker, though, was the siding of the beanhole, which he'd made out of old curved bricks salvaged from the firebox of a steam locomotive, presumably back when such things could be regularly found outside of museums. Of course on the bottom of the hole was this great flat rock, which had to be saved as well, for as my father said you just don't come across a nice, flat rock like that all too often.

Sometimes I just love being an upcountry yankee. Use it up, wear it out and all that.

Returning home with all four of the kettles, our beanhole salvage, a random bucket of dirt and sundry other things tossed into the bed of the truck, we of course had now to wrestle the kettles back off the trailer and into their appointed holding area until my father figured out what to do with them for good. The spot, next to my brother's ice fishing shanty (previously also my grandfather's), had a lot of burdocks growing there so of course we had to cut them down first, then wrestle the kettles down and unload everything else. Then there was the pile of slowly rotting apples under the apple tree on the front lawn we needed to shovel up and haul off, and three or four boxes of stove wood to be split and brought in from the barn, since we were at it...

In our defense we did manage to get everything done before company arrived, but it was a matter of minutes, and I was still getting changed at that point. Yippie for that, I guess.

A Touch of Evil

2009-11-06T22:57:00.003-05:00

Tonight's post brought to you by an odd mix of Orson Welles and Judas Priest.

Where to begin, where to begin. My first semester of PhD work is about half-way done and I'm managing to keep my head above water...mostly. The past couple of weeks have been incredibly hectic, due to the undergrad class I'm TA for having its midterm on October 28th and subsequently needing to have them all graded by last Wednesday. Given that there, roughly, 118 undergrads in the class and this was my first time out, I'm simultaneously pleased I managed to get them all done in time while appalled at how badly so many of the students did. This isn't that difficult of a class, no one who's paid any attention in class ought to have not at least passed. So far only had one kid come in to bitch about his grade, which I've neither the authority nor inclination to change, so that's something at least.

Albany's working out for me pretty well so far, I have to say; my place is a little further from the action than I'd like but it's a very small thing to complain about. I've managed a good dynamic with the other grad TAs, at least so far I've managed to come off as charming if eccentric as opposed to disturbingly bizarre. Not sure if that reflects favorably on me or poorly on them, to be honest.

Halloween was last weekend, as I doubt anyone was unaware. The party was at the Stone's, as it's been for a couple years now since, you know, they actually have a house. I wore my outfit from Conspiracy: The Gilded Age as frankly I couldn't afford to spend any more money on costuming this year, but just so it wasn't a complete rerun I grew out my facial hair (which for various reasons I'd not been able to do for game itself). Specifically, I went with muttonchops and though it was only a week's worth I think it came in fairly nicely. Given the lighting it's not as distinct as it was in person as my beard comes in with a lot of red and blond hair, due to quirk of my genetic heritage.

The party itself was the usual raucous good time, and I managed to neither fall over nor break anyone's metatarsals despite wearing hobnailed boots the entire time. There were a few bruises of unknown origins the next day and the entirely expected massive hangover, but hell what Halloween party's complete without those? I managed to not make a complete ass of myself, which about all you can aim for, and didn't do anything I've had cause to regret since. Or at least nothing I can think of nor anything anyone else's mentioned.

Best I can hope for, most like.

Leaving Boston

2009-07-28T00:56:00.003-04:00

In August of 2006 I left DC for Boston, anticipating that I'd work some scutt job for a year or so and then, if I was still determined to do so, apply to and be accepted into a doctoral program in one of the many universities in or around beantown. Regular readers will I trust indulge my flight of fancy for the moment when I say that, regardless of one's cosmology, making plans is the surest way to hear god laugh.

As you ought all now to know, I've only just gotten back into school and it's in Albany, NY, not Boston at all. I was down there last evening and this morning gathering up the last of my belongings still in my old apartment and cleaning the hell out of the place with my roommate in the (likely quixotic) hope of recovering the majority if not entirety of our security deposit. We had kept the place in pretty good shape, being both fairly neat by nature, but there was still a lot of little odds and ends to be cleaned up and areas that had acquired dust and grime by dint of just being inaccessible to the regular maintenance schedule. Plus, as anyone's who's moved can tell you, you discover the strangest bits and pieces you really should have thrown out years ago, hiding in the odd corners and closets (and this for me after having done the major move weeks ago).

By 11 the place was essentially empty, and certainly so of my things, and scrubbed to a mirror shine in all the places that mattered; there were some scuffs on the (hardwood) floor that came from either not putting matts/coasters down under furniture early enough or, in the case of my old bed, failing to consider that even with those one has to consider the effect of...enthusiastic exta-curricular activities. Come to find out now, our asshole landlord is trying to soak us of a significant portion of our security deposit for things he's responsible for, so we might as well have just shit all over the floor before leaving for all the good all that work did us but fear not, my roommate's preparing to lawyer the fuck out of him if he doesn't back down and return our cash. It's a shame, really, other than that dick I loved my time at that place; it was ideally located and not all that bad on rent, especially for the greater Boston region.

Albany I'm not sure on yet. So far the impression it's made on me is of a bigger, sprawlier Burlington with somewhat greater ethnic diversity and way more churches. A lot more christian radio than I'm used to, which though good for a laugh is a bit disconcerting means correspondingly less metal. Also there's a noted paucity of sidewalks, at least uptown where I live and the campus I'm going to be doing most if not all of my work up here, which sucks from a inline skating perspective; haven't gone looking for bike paths yet though, so that might not be the biggest problem. A new place, new adventures, all that jazz. Plus the bonus of home ownership means I'm constantly thinking about shit to add onto this place/fix things I don't like about the layout. Wheeee.

Long Road to Morning

2009-06-26T22:55:00.003-04:00

Ahhhh...man am I feeling relaxed right now. For those of you who I suspect are just now tuning in for the first time (hi, Ece!), congrats, you found me. I told you lot I had a blog out there, you just weren't looking in the right places to find it. Anyway, on with the show.

Today was my last day at the evil software company I've been working for since late 2006 and don't it feel awesome to be done with it. The tech support team I was on was comprised of a great group of people,* but lord do I hate the work itself. Even beyond the fact that I was supporting (poorly written and worse debugged) marketing software that in part allows sales and marketing dicks to more effectively advertise and spam you, there's just something profoundly unsatisfying about product support. No matter how many tickets you put to bed or how many defects you discover and log in, they just keep coming in a never ending stream, leaving a lack of any sense of accomplishment that's positively Sisyphean.

Since for some bizzare reason they like rather than fear me, the team took me out to lunch at a chinese buffet place we go from time to time; it's got pretty good selection, isn't some hole in the wall, and frankly it's always a circus watching some of the team go hog wild and make themselves sick from overeating. They also decided I needed a going away gift and/or to be appeased with alcohol to prevent me from burning the joint down on my way out the door, and as such presented me with a bag o' booze that, well, let's just say the level of quality varied wildly. Seriously, everything from Jack Daniels single barrel to Wild Irish Rose (Steve lamented that he couldn't find Thunderbird); I get a headache just looking at some of it.

Well now I'm done, done at last, with IT. HR apparently hadn't gotten word that I was headed out the door, despite how regularly and loudly I've been proclaiming it for over a month now, so I managed to avoid an exit interview. Not that I'd have minded, honestly, especially since we've something of a tradition of having a wee bit o' scotch Friday late afternoons, but it's likely for the best that I didn't end up traumatizing some HR drone. Not that they might not have deserved it, anyway.

Given that I'm fairly lazy about updating this thing, I suppose it behooves me to speak at some length about a few other things of import. First, of all the schools I was accepted to for my doctorate work, the only one to offer full funding was SUNY-Albany, so sometime next month I'm headed to upstate New York to get settled before school starts in late August. First impressions of Albany are that it's a bigger, sprawlier version of Burlington with more prominent churches. Not sure yet if I'm going to like it or not; frankly having lived in DC and Boston may have spoiled me on places too small to have subways. Not that it really matters; I'm there for school and fully expect it to take up the overwhelming majority of my time so surroundings take a markedly lessened importance in the greater scheme of things.

There's been plenty of other goings on lately which, were I more concerned with keeping you rabble entertained than with indulging my own desire for sleep, I'd write about at length here. However, I'm not, so I won't, at least not right now. But who knows, I'm sure to succumb sooner or later to the insane urge to post here again, with whatever the hell I'm up to where ever I find myself next.

*That's not to say there haven't been a few duds and a couple outright chodes now and again, although they've all since departed. Chief among them was of course Wee Willie Washout Dana Waterhouse, but the tale of that mouthbreathing troglodyte's brief, disastrous reign over the team need not distract us here from what ought to be a fairly positive post.

Bad News for the Boston Babydolls

2009-05-16T11:32:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, getting home from work, I found a voicemessage waiting from Cole inviting me out to fund raising show the Boston Babydolls were putting on down in central square. Come to find out, they've been in a protracted legal battle with one of the city counselors in Quincy who is hellbent on running them out of their studio, on the cartoonishly puritanical grounds that burlesque is somehow code for prostitution or some other vague moral threat for uptight retards to get up in arms about.

This all started in September of 2008 when they rented a dance studio in North Quincy and Ward Six City Councilor Brian McNamee decided that just wouldn't do for whatever reasons were bubbling in his toxic and damaged mind. Ever since he's been trying to get them thrown out on the that their use of the space constitutes a change of use from the previous tenants....a dance and exercise studio. The show last night, with attendant auction of various things, was to attempt to restock the Babydolls' depleted warchest, as they've got one more hearing before the zoning board of appeals this Tuesday and are frankly approaching the end of their rope, both legally and monetarily.

The performers were, it goes without saying, in fine form and the show a great deal of fun (despite the A/C not working until half-way through). However Scratch, co-founder and perennially zoot-suited frontman for the Babydolls, isn't optimistic that they're going to win their appeal next week. Apparently the neighborhood they're in has been pretty effectively turned against them, to the tune of them getting hate mail and threatening phone calls, and screaming evangelicals (is there anything those pricks won't ruin) showing up to protest their last hearing. Odds are, they're going to lose their studio space and have to go looking again for a permanent home for the troupe.

This late in the game, I doubt there's anything material that can be done to support them, although Scratch did say that anyone willing to give testimony on Tuesday as to why burlesque in general or the Babydolls in particular aren't bad things would be appreciated (although non-Quincy residents, which comprise everyone who reads this last I checked, likely won't be weighted very heavily). From what Scratch and the others said both during and after the show they've been having a pretty rough time of it, so if you've seen them before and enjoyed the show or are just motivated by my long-winded rambling here, you might let them know via their contact page.

After Action Report: Boston Burlesque Expo 2009

2009-04-12T20:33:00.002-04:00

This past weekend was the Boston Burlesque Expo down here in Boston; I hadn't originally planned on attending as this was supposed to be a Deadlands weekend, but that got called on account of it being that holiday where the christian savior rose from the dead to hide eggs and chocolate rabbits or whatever. And Nick Jabour and Cole both got talked/roped into helping out, so I figured why not head over and see what's what?

The expo itself was held at our old friend the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, which was slightly more difficult to get to than it was for Arisia on account of there being no shuttle buses from Kendall station (and the city bus that I'd have otherwise taken doesn't run on the weekend). As such, I walked from Kendall to the hotel, in a grey rain thinking appropriately noir thoughts all the way. I got there just before my hat and coat would have soaked through, thankfully.

Now we've all complained that the Hyatt is (among other complaints) far too small a hotel for a con like Arisia; this is not a charge that can be leveled against it hosting the Burlesque Expo. The Expo is a much, much smaller affair; the dealer's room/art show/costume exhibit were all in the ballroom, which had a dividing wall cutting it in half to leave the other bit for other things of which I didn't have access with the basic pass I bought. More on that later, but what I'm driving at here is that this was a very small affair by our standards; unless my memories are tricking me, I think even Northeastern Wars draws a bigger crowd and takes up more space. There were classes in the ground-floor conference rooms Arisia uses for panels, and in the room back past the restaurant there were four or five vendors who had their own rooms (in one of which I barely resisted buying a pith helmet).

The crowd itself was also pretty small, probably only somewhere between one and two hundred people though admittedly I'm lousy at judging numbers and I didn't attend Friday evening. That, incidentally, was apparently my loss and Nick and Cole report that the pool party which was that was quite the event (and Cole reportedly injured herself during which). Those that did attend, though, were all in all a good crowd. I don't recall seeing a single one of the trundling landmonsters who've been stinkin' up Arisia for years now, and everyone seemed to be enjoying what there was to see and do.

The performances themselves were something of a mixed bag, with a lot of enthusiasm on everyone's parts but sadly not always enough to make up for a lack of ability. To be brutally honest as well, not everyone had, in my opinion, the....err...necessary physique to be a burlesque dancer, far be it from me to slander or make fun of someone solely based on their carriage. That said, it was roughly fifty-fifty of good versus bad performances, and of the good about half of those were really good. And hey, even bad burlesque is usually worth watching.

One guy attending, who's badge read Dr. Wilson, did some up-close magic while I was hanging out with Cole at the merch table which is always fun; he was a little slopped on a few of his loads and plants, but if I had been standing directly in front of him instead of off to the side I don't know that I would have caught him (and since he was a great showman I of course had no reason to call him on it). After he was done we talked along with the guy who ran the sideshow (along with his girlfriend who is the spitting image of Christa, albeit slightly taller) about magic and the like for about an hour which was of course fun (and I got to recycle my Discovery Channel job interview story to great effect). It was also when loitering about that I ran into one of the special guests, Candy Caramelo, who from what you can see there was a friggin' bombshell back in the day but these days is, well, think a heavier, late-career May West. Her makeup was caked on an inch thick, her formerly lovely curves had long since lost the war with gravity, and good lord was her perfume overpowering even at several yards away. But you know what, she seemed to take her physical degradation in stride and indeed played to it (at least in the short encounter I had with her). She still seemed to enjoy it, and certainly didn't seem oblivious to her not being a smoldering sexpot anymore, and according to Cole who saw her perform on Friday, still can move despite being at least in her late sixties.

In fact, I'd attribute the small size of the Expo and its newness (this is only the second or third one they've done as I understand it) as an asset in that people weren't nearly as cliquey as they get at, say, Arisia, and you aren't likely to get lost in vast, anonymous crowds like we often do at DragonCon. I also spent a fair amount of time speaking with a staffer named Andrea who apparently is a friend of Jana and Douglas, so we've actually got some bleed over in social circles with the people who run it. She thought your performance in Dracula was impeccable by the way, Deja.

However, it's clear that the people running this are still very green and learning by doing; for the very small size of the Expo there was a dizzying amount of granularity in the types of tickets/badges you could get, much more so than I think the Expo can justify. On a related note, while basic admission was a very reasonable ten dollars, actually getting into the master classes, the pool party and seeing the show were all in my opinion vastly overpriced. Similarly, the tech and lighting for the shows was obviously an amateur affair, though it didn't bother me as much as it did Nick who nearly had a psychotic episode as a result.

All in all, even these negatives taken into consideration, it was well worth the price I paid to get in, though at this point I don't know that anyone from out of town would be justified in coming down for it if they didn't at least have a place to crash in town. I did get a very positive vibe off of the entire affair and its going to be one to watch over the next couple of year; if the organizers can get their act together in regards to the negatives I've mentioned, this could well grown pretty rapidly (presuming the current resurgence of burlesque isn't going to flame out as a passing fancy in mainstream fandom, of course).

Back in Black

2009-02-17T20:11:00.002-05:00

Regular readers, who I suspect more and more exist only in my diseased imagination, ought to know by now that I've been trying to get back into grad school for a couple years now. I made the decision to go back for my PhD back in 2007 and subsequently ran headlong into a brick wall when applying for the Fall 2008 semester. All eight schools I'd applied to dropped me like a bad check, which was a quite a kick in the pride. Not a totally unprecedented one, frankly, given that it took me two tries to get into GWU back in 2004 for my MA, but still.

Admissions at this level are competitive to the extreme, I was assured and chose to believe, so it wasn't necessarily that bad a sign that I'd not gotten in. Try again, my MA adviser urged me, which I did this past year after going through the ordeal of taking the GREs yet again (well worth it, since I maxed out my score in verbal this time). Ten schools made the list this time, some repeats, some not. And as of this past week, the first letter has arrived.

Given that the title of this post is "Back in Black," as opposed to "Time for a Shooting Spree at Work, Saving the Last Bullet for Myself," you can probably see where I'm going with all of this. It, the letter that is, was from the University of Maine, and was their acceptance of me back into academia. I can't describe how lightning-in-the-blood good this has had me feeling ever since getting it. I don't have to stay out here in the cold any longer; I've got my future back. It made it much harder than usual to be morose and surly on Valentines' Day as is my usual practice, not that I didn't try.

All that said, UMaine wasn't and isn't my ideal choice from all the schools on my list, but I'll surely take it; it's sort of a given that any school I actually applied to is one I'd be willing to go to. But hey, who knows where I'll end up, still plenty to hear back from and all that.

In other news, I had dinner with some friends of mine who were down in Providence for a fetish con this past weekend (although I had left before the mail came, so didn't know my good luck at the time); we ate late so I ended up killing time at the Providence Place mall which abuts the hotel where their con takes place. It was crowded like your usual Saturday night wouldn't normally see, overflowing with perverts and townie shitheads. All told, I preferred the perverts.

Say Hello to Heaven

2009-02-08T21:24:00.004-05:00

You know for a one-album tribute band, Temple of the Dog is fucking amazing. Two of my grunge-era heroes before they hit it big, Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell, and I can listen to the whole disc through without ever once wanting to skip a track. But that's not what I cam here to talk about today, just the very slightly clever lead-in, so let's get down to it.

I visit my friends up in Burlington, VT fairly often; I'd count it an odd month that I'm not up there at least once. As such, I usually stay at Jamie's condo, where I lived for a month and change shortly before leaving for DC. From time to time I still get the odd piece of mail there, believe it or not, and whenever I'm up I check to see if I've hit publisher's clearinghouse* or have been subpoenaed by the Senate or anything.

Previously it's mostly been junk-mail and the like, but last time I was up I was surprise to find an envelope waiting me with a hand-written and -stamped envelope from a woman I don't know. As such, my initial thoughts were something to the tune of "oh shit what embarrassing and potentially homicidal threat from my past is this, especially since I don't pack heat when I'm travelling?" A moment later, having feverishly run through my mental list of names, I realized this wasn't anyone I know or at least, no one I've known for at least a decade. As such, it was pretty unlikely to be either a bomb or bio-chemical weapon and man of action that I am I opened it without further delay.

Within the envelope there were two things, the first of which I'll lead in with as the second would give the game away. I found, enclosing object #2, a letter from a woman (or very slightly possibly a man with an exceptionally misleading name) who apparently cared a great deal whether or not I subscribed to that particular esoteric flavor of fringe christianity known at Jehovah's Witnesses (what they witnessed him doing I've no idea and they're not telling, to get that tired joke out of way early on). The pamphlet itself was basically what you'd expect, a somewhat creepy mix of biblical literalism and disturbing eagerness for the onset of the End Times in anticipation of the blessed kingdom of heaven to come.

The letter, handwritten by the woman who'd apparently felt such a need to pass on the Good News to me, was a little disappointing to be honest. It's not that I doubt the woman's fanati-err, enthusiam for her nutty little cult, but the passage she chose was a real letdown; I mean when I saw her lead in with Revelation I figured "oh boy this'll be good," but no, she chose 21:4 which is bland even by the standards of the rest of the New Testament, let alone by the most wild-eyed, frothing-at-the-mouth book in the whole bible. John of Atmos was completely off his gourd, and she just chose one of his passages about God will wipe away suffering and all evil things.

Seriously? In a book where she could have chosen to harangue me with some real crackpot stuff about the Great Whore of Babylon? Or smiting with fire and the blood on the fields of Armageddon rising to the height of a horse's chest? What a damn letdown, I was so set for a good apoplectic rant and she pulls this namby-pamby feel good crap.

I tell ya man, these unhinged religious loons just ain't like they used to be.

*Come to think of it, I don't know that I've seen a Publisher's Clearinghouse sweepstakes envelope in going on twenty years; did they go under or just drop the mailings due to the Internet or something? I used to doing all those scratch tickets and affixing the stamps back when I was a kid, which is honestly more a commentary on the bleakness of entertainment options in rural Vermont in the 1980s than anything I could make up.

After Action Report: Arisia 2009

2009-01-18T18:38:00.002-05:00

This was Arisia weekend down here in Boston, and I got comped a pass for helping Nick Jabour run a one-off session of his Mage live action game. The game itself went alright, but we only got to use maybe ten percent of the plot threads Nick had written as we got barely a handful of players; I put it down to the game running in a timeslot with lots of competition (Saturday evening). Were it not for that, I doubt I would have gone at all but hey, free is nice and they best parties are on Saturday night.

Con itself was, again, at the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge where it's been slowly crumbling in on itself for the past few years. Previous bitch sessions have already covered basically everything wrong with Arisia these days so I'll just recap briefly: the hotel is still too small and crowded, there are still too many damn children running about, the elevators are still constantly packed with bloated, unwashed, entitlement-minded retards with no concept of indoor voices, and the people running Con still seem hellbent on stamping everyone's experience down to some family-friendly level of uniform blandness. And Filk still sucks.

It continues to perplex me that, for the second year in a row now, they didn't have a separate dealer's room, instead just having dealer's row on the third floor, effectively pricing out anyone who couldn't afford dealer's rates on a room. Of those dealers who were present, though, the quality level has improved somewhat, including Pendragon Designs (the people I got my leather Farscape vest from) and Brute Force Leather had a couple of steampunk arm prostheses (since everyone's into steampunk these days) that were very impressive.

The art show was, again, way the fuck up on the top floor but, surprisingly, worth hiking up to get to (as being packed in an elevator with the mouthbreathers for that many floors is pure hell if you can even squeeze in between their rascals/overlarge baby carriages). They had space for student displays again, which I had thought would never come back, and a large number of the pros were new, so it wasn't just booth after booth of the same semi-furry crap from last year. Here too Arisia reaped the benefit of steampunk being the in theme of the moment with a number of clockwork things on display that were pretty damn imaginative.

The nightlife was the only unqualified success of Con, as it was last year and presumably will be again next. Evan, unfortunately for me, Nick and Cole, wasn't hosting this year and had made rocketfuel the previous night at someone else's party. As such, we spent the night with the skanks, where I got my ass grabbed a couple of times.* The theme this year was The Circus, but they basically only required you be in a costume of some sort, so no need for even the styrofoam goggles this time around. Barfleet and the mad scientists had parties on other floors, which looked to be pretty jumping but we didn't bother checking them out.

That the parties were doing so well, in contrast to pretty much everything else isn't in my mind too hopeful of a sign, though. The thought has occurred to me that it's almost as if the Arisia planners are willfully trying to segregate out all the fun stuff and stuff it into a discreet place where all the kids don't have to see it. And to a point sure, that makes sense, but it's just another sign that Arisia is more concerned with having a family image than in making sure there's enough of a draw for everyone; as fun as they are I sure wouldn't have paid the price of admission for one evening of partying.

So that was Arisia 2009, basically more of the same and not a lot of reason to be all that hopeful that things will soon return to how they were back in the Park Plaza years. It's still a fun time, but not enough of one to compel anyone from out of town to come down or, honestly, even for me to have otherwise attended if I hadn't had a free pass. I'll close though with a chance encounter I had that, while not particularly significant for me, will likely resonate with some of you. It was around eight or nine in the evening, and I'd stepped out of the room Nick had gotten for game to get some water. In front of the water cooler were two guys, about ten to twenty years older than me if I had to guess, talking about open source coding. The one speaking when I got there, and blocking the cooler, had longish hair, a unkempt full beard and basically was every stereotype you could think of for an open-source/linux/whatever nerd. Of these, the one that sort of annoyed me was obliviousness, as he didn't seem to realize I was trying to get at the water that his moderate bulk (I'd not call him fat but he wasn't thin either) was preventing me from reaching. Finally, he noticed me there and stepped aside, turning as he did so I could see his badge.

It had an event participant ribbon on it, and read "Richard Stallman." He really is the ur-geek he's always made out to be.

*Both times were from women I'd call attractive, which might seem oddly defensive of me to point out but we've all seen the trundling landbeasts that can be found at Arisia so I figured I'd cut you jokers off at the pass here.

Hey, Anyone Else Hear That?

2009-01-12T20:52:00.002-05:00

No? Huh, I could have sworn I heard something.

Wait, wait, shut up a second- There it is again! Now tell me you didn't hear that!

Oh for christ's sake it's clear as day! It's like it's some kind of goddamn Conspiracy I tells ya!

He did it

2008-11-05T20:31:00.000-05:00

With fuckin' style.

I think...

2008-05-01T20:14:00.012-04:00

Barack Obama is going to make history tonight. At last.

Ten Pounds of Shit, Five Pound Bag

2008-01-24T20:48:00.005-05:00

I usually try to leave off personal bitching here unless it's either funny or amazingly relevant to my largely imaginary audience, but christ do I feel like hell. Some manner of microorganism (let's leave the "are viruses legitimately alive" debate for another day) has colonized me, and is currently engaged in ratching up my sinus pressure to just under Trinity test site-levels, which simultaneously making just about every head opening I've got leak noxious fluids. Oh, were you eating something? My bad.

Anyway. life at work's been interesting of late, feel free to read into that whatever ulterior statement you like. You know how you, from time to time on news outlets of varying reliability, hear about someone posting something vaguely risque on their livejournal/blog/myspace/whatever and then getting canned for it? And it's usually something entirely mundane to which no one with the slightly sense of humor or sense of perspective would ever, ever take offense? Yeah, that's essentially why I'm not going into specifics here. Suffice it to say I got away with something, barely, and ain't gonna press my luck, no sir.

Should be hearing back from schools soon about that whole PhD thing I've been taking a swing at, which believe me is much more critically important to my sense of self worth than such a casual statement might lead you to believe. As aggrivating and draining as academia can be, I can't think of anywhere else I'd rather be. Plus the closest thing to a legitimate excuse I can find for the level of immaturity/non-boringness I try to keep my life at.

Hey, that's a decent excuse to segue into a recent phenomenon, people I know approaching/turning thirty! I've got a couple years left myself before that dread age, but more and more of my friends are either closing in on it or over the line. That time passing fascinates me should surprise precisely no one, given my preferred vocation is studying the past, but there's of course a difference in reading someone else's memoirs and having a front row seat to things happening. I'm always wondering what, of all the things I encounter on a given day, what percentage of them will end up in some dispassionate sense Mattering to someone, be in personally or in some larger, public sense. What of all the crap, most of it seemingly mundane, I see day in and out will ultimately rate at least a footnote in a history book someday: "Much later, after his landslide election and ignominous impeachment, the president would reflect is had been that phone call telling him his gym membership had been arbtrarily cancelled that inspired him to run for city council so many years before."

Yeah, not terribly likely, but you'd be surprised what retroactively gets cast as significant when people write histories. Seriously, in some of the best works on Lincoln I've ever read, books with exhaustive detailing and insightful analysis, I've found magnitude ascribed to the weirdest shit. Outside perspective's a funny thing and only gets funnier the further in time you get from an event.

Oh, those of you who frequent this might've noticed I didn't post a line from the J Geils Band's Love Stinks for Valentine's Day this year. I assure you, you need not worry that I somehow managed to be happy or with someone for once, oh no. As always, I stayed up listening to the song in question, drinking whiskey and angrily devouring cold Chef Boyardee's Lonely Style ravioli from the can. I just forgot to post the line is all, get off my damn back! What about the rights of that little girl, chief!

He's Catching on, I Tell Ya!

2008-01-03T19:50:00.000-05:00

We open tonight's update with the title line about this year's disconcerting joke candidate for the Republican party, wizened immigrant-baiting crazy man Ron Paul. This gold standard advocating anti-tax goblin has lit a firestorm in hearts of semi-functional libertarian retards* across the internet. If your 'sperging and living in your mother's basement after turning 30, he is the candidate for you. Chief among his campaign goals are to completely ruin the US economy by repealing income tax and replacing it with nothing, return our currency to the gold standard, revoke birthright citizenship (but only for them brown people what come from south of the border, of course), murder puppies, remove the Supreme Court's power to hear first amendment cases, ensure each state's right to segregate and exclude whatever minority they've got a problem with and make sure the homos can't marry. You may think I'm making some of that up, and you're right! He technically hasn't promised to murder puppies, ha ha, what a card am I!

Seriously, there's nothing appealing at all about this guy once you stratch the very surface of who he is and what he stands for. Dumbass objectivist cretins** tend to like him as they somehow believe that they'd be captains of industry if someone like him got elected rather than the wage slave drones they currently are, rather than the corpses they'd almost certain wind up being in the hellish Mad Max-esque nightmare the country would without doubt decend into should Paul get within fifteen feet of the oval office. They believe this due to metal posioning due to drinking too much colloidal silver and terminal exposure to whiny loser Ayn Rand's wish-fulfillment novel Atlas Shrugged (and her rape fantasy indulgence The Fountainhead).

But enough politics for now, amusing at this facet thereof is. The year has turned and I feel compelled to reflect briefly on 2007. The year was a fairly eventful one for me, which isn't entirely a good thing but it never ceased to be interesting at least. Things went down between me and some women, whom I've written obliquely of before and ain't gonna git no more specific now than before. If you matter then you already now, anyway. The Conspiracy was an unqualified triumph, showing I still got it, and we can still get the band back together. I got my apps in for doctoral study and my MA thesis accepted for publication in an independant journal. A bunch of people got married, and were it not for the one exception, happily and successfully so, so far.

Ah, but that one case really is the stickler, isn't it? The trouble being caused is do to one of them refusing to be anything but a selfish, insular asshole, and that the other is willing to put up with it and be walked all over surely makes it hard to be sympathetic or, for that matter, to avoid run-on sentences describing the matter. I don't doubt for a second that the one of them that did what caused the huge scandal post-wedding is still doing it, and continuing to lie to us all about it. What's worse, the individual in question may even have browbeat their spouse into letting it continue, which is nothing short of a tragedy.

I used to think very highly of them both, and this is making it very hard to continue doing so. It's a bad scene and one by one, the rest of us are washing our hands of it and of them, which is doubly depressing for having known and respected them for so long before this.

Who knows, maybe 2008 will lead to some manner of dramatic turn around. Not that I'm terribly optimistic, but then again, when ever am I? Guess we'll see when we see, won't we?

*I'm being a little redundant here, as by definition self-identifying libertarians are retarded, but I wanted to make clear these ones are somehow even more retarded than the norm.

**Ditto.

Leverage your Proactive Paradigm Synergy

2007-11-07T19:26:00.000-05:00

There's a certain feeling, almost an electrical undercurrent you sense when your body temperature is over a hundred degrees. I'm more familiar with it than I'd care to be, both generally and specifically. Generally, as I believe I've mentioned before, there was a period in grade school where I was sick for what amounts to most of a semester; specifically as I'm running a fever right now, which blows. Last night I went to bed hoping I was just worn out from the late shift (which I also hate), and woke up hallucinating around one in the morning. It took me a while to find my way from my bedroom to the bathroom to get some advil, which given that it's all of three steps is saying something about the power of fever dreams.

It's been an eventful few weeks, these past three or so, to say the least. Some shit went down that I had dearly, dearly hoped was past us all, and it's lead to bloody thoughts and harsh language. I hate it when I'm forced into a situation where I end up thinking less of my friends, but there it is and no, I'm not going to name names here as everyone involved knows who they are, and this doesn't need further stirring up. About a week after that, something else happened, something that was literally years in the waiting. For a week or so following, I had almost started to think it was going the way I had scarce dared to hope, but alas it did not. It's not failed for sure, and is going to be reexamined in a few months after certain things have come to pass, but for the moment I'm left alone, where I was when I started, albeit with a better understanding of past events.

And if you can parse my meaning from that storm of pronouns and vagueries, you're more clever than you look, look you never so clever.

Which brings us to the frivelous, from which I derived the title of this post. Several weeks ago was the employee conference for the evil software company at which I work. It opened with breakdancers, of all, things, in an effort to get our energy up and more susceptible to indocrination and company spirit-imprinting to come. I commented it was too damn early for same, and was told to shut the hell up. That happens a lot, incidentally.

As expeced, the conference was a cavalcade of slobbering over the sales and marketting goobs, with short shrift payed to the grunts what actually make the products. I kept a running tally of inane industry buzzwords bandied about by the various speakers in an effort to sound smarter than they were; leveredge, used inapporpriately as a verb, came in well ahead of the rest at fifteen times. Synergy, which I had thought was going to be an also-ran, came from behind at the last minute as the final speaker said it four times in as many sentences, bringing it up to five. Going-forward and paradigm both got used three times each, with proactive coming in last with a surprising single use. I sent this list out to the rest of the support team, which most people thought found funny, except for one of the managers.

She told me it was inappropriate, and to shut the hell up.

Don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to make it at this job before I finally go too far in my eternal quest for humor and to not be bored to death. Here's to hoping my PhD apps return many acceptences, with generous funding and, oh I don't know, two or three Scarlett Johannsen-level hangers-on since I'm headed into the realm of fantasy now.

Then again, I'm likely to be seeing things again tonight, so maybe my feverish imagination will supply the latter in spite of itself.

Faking the Funk

2007-09-05T19:34:00.000-04:00

I've not updated in quite a while, and for once I've got a (semi) acceptable excuse. For the past four weekends I've been away from my apartment, back up in Vermont for various reasons both enjoyable and not. I've been running my ass ragged and had I not been able to slack off this weekend at last, I've no doubt that I'd have one of my rare but spectacular patented Big Pat Freakouts, building a fort in the living room out of sofa cushions and refusing to come out for any reason whatsoever. There's a lot to get down here, so let's do this thing chronologically; anyone needing to use the restroom should do so now as persons leaving the theater of my diseased imagination will not be readmitted once the show begins.

Labor Day weekend heralded a return trip to Dragon*Con, complete with superfluous asterix as always. It was, as was the first trip, an amazingly good time, made more enjoyable in that I had my own room this year and didn't again have to sleep in the company of two of the most notorious snorers I've ever known. As before, I was unable to burn Atlanta to the ground despite my best efforts. The con itself was great fun, and I went in costume for once as John Crichton, which was something of an investment but certainly worth it given the compliments I got. Yes, stroke my ego, yes. This also taught me a couple of things, one of which I was expecting, the other not: First, wearing almost all leather in August in Atlanta means a fair amount of sweat when not in A/C, and second, when in leather pants and wearing a drop holster, it's impossible not to swagger everywhere you go.

Now onto something much less pleasant; on September 9th I got word from my mother that my paternal grandmother, Susan Cornelius Gallagher, had fallen during the night while in hospital. She had a skull fracture and intracranial bleeding, and it was likely only a matter of time. Sure enough, on the 10th, she died at 92 years of age, having never regained consciousness. I went back up to the Kingdom that weekend, to help my parents clean up and start clearing out her house in East Burke; both she and my grandfather, who died when I was 16, had been something of packrats (although not near the level of those OCD weirdos you see specials on from time to time) and they had been there for thirty years, so it goes without saying that there was and still is a ton of stuff to haul out.

Indulge me as I wax maudlin for a moment, but there is something to be said for the things we leave behind in life, both the momentus and incidental. In my grandfather's study we found a box with piles of rolled pennies with a handwritten note addressed to me, my brother, and our cousins (all the grandchildren), telling us not to spend them until we were desperate. Among the photo albums we located one from the 1920s and 1930s, which included pictures of the Hindenburg during its first season of operation, probably a year or so before it blew up over Lakehurst. Over the front door was my father's single shot 12 gauge he'd had growing up and long since forgotten about. Live long enough, and you too will have an eventful life with much left behind by which to be remembered.

Of course, there was also a lot of crap to just get rid of, most of it in the basement. My grandparents had both been huge gardeners, although my grandmother's knee problems and general old age had lead to first the gigantic lower garden and then the smaller upper garden becoming disused a few years after my grandfather's death. However the majority of all the gear they had used in preserving had remained in the basement, despite my father's best efforts to haul it out incrementally over the past year or so. This included several cabinets overflowing with mason jars (the majority of them mercifully empty), both the modern screw top ones and a fair number of old glass-and-gasket topped model which were saved from the recycling bin as collectors are occasionally willing to pay for them. Getting them all out, whether for recycling or the yard sale, was onerous but nothing compared with hauling up the three huge freezers (one of which was at least fifty years old if not older); those my father and I had to man-handled to the stairs on a gurney and then hauled up the stairs via cable hitched to the truck. That we managed to get them up the stairs at all without breaking anything is somewhat amazing.

The weekend following that was the memorial service that we had been cleaning up the house for. Of that I don't have a ton to say, really, other than it was what you'd expect; a life remembered and celebrated, and thankfully no priest or other cleric (like my grandfather before her my grandmother's written wish was for cremation and a non-religious memorial) to try to make it about their imaginary friend rather than the departed. It was about as pleasant as something like that can be expected to be, all told.

Enough of the death talk. The weekend following the memorial, with not a ton of advance notice, was Nate Tessman's second Cthulu live action one shot. I was in the first and so got invited to this one as well. Unlike the first session, several years ago, this was a single evening affair, and honestly they probably should have held it a couple of weeks earlier as when the sun went in it got juuuust a little too cold for comfort. It was a fun game nonetheless, and unlike the last one the characters weren't slaughtered to a man. Games are usually more fun when you live through them, although interestingly it's not always the case. There is to be at least one more, at some point next summer so if you're interested, let Nate know and the sooner the better; you know I'll be there.

Last weekend was Mary's wedding, which again brought me up to Burlington. The ceremony was a full Catholic wedding mass, which the pack of degenerates, recidivists, heathens and (alright, alright) a very few actually observant christians that make up my friends, somehow got through without ruining it for Mary or getting our ass tossed out by the Priest presiding. The reception was at the Echo center (another way in which structurally this wedding mirrored Liz's), and I was quite pleased that the wedding party came in to the Imperial March; it's not Queen, but a pretty nice touch none the less. The only real downside, other than I was pretty tired from not having a day off in so long, was that it rained most all day without only occasional breaks. The temptation to make November Rain and Alannis Morrisette jokes was nigh on irresistable, I tell ya. And you'll all be pleased to know I purported myself with...considerably less zest and, err, enthusiasm than the previous wedding back in August. Which is a euphemistic way to say I didn't get any action nor macked on a particular hot chick (she wasn't in attendence) this time; alas, my libido, it remainth frustrated.*

So that's all I've been up to lately, and am so pleased I didn't have to do anything of substance this weekend. Of course, I've got another (and finally the last one for this year) wedding next weekend, down in Connecticut somewhere. And I've got work left to do on my PhD apps, and the Conspiracy epilogue to finish, as well as all the other manic nonsense that makes up my day to day affairs. For the moment, though, I'm idling in neutral and loving it no matter how momentary a pause it is. All I have planned for tonight is some long-delayed video games and a glass or three of whiskey, and I'm glad I'm in no rush to even get to those. See you all next time, when I'll likely be back up to my usual breakneck speed, careening as usual towards a brick wall.

*Yeah, yeah, I know what I said last time about the llama and it still holds true, unfortunately. It's a nice thing to fantasize about in the abstract though, so I'm gonna and ain't no ones gonna stops me.

Bacon Gravy is the Answer to Why Life Exists

2007-08-26T18:46:00.000-04:00

The weekend of the 18th heralded a great and long-heralded event among my friends and extended social circle; Damiana and Pathin finally, after dating/being engaged for eight plus years now, got married. I'm not going to go into the hazard that made it less than a certainty in recent times, as, well, that'd just piss me off and possibly you too if you know about it. It didn't come up at the ceremony or reception, although I'm told it was a close thing at times.

Anyway, screw that noise, on with the tale of good times. The reception was at the Sheraton in Burlington, which sadly did not feature an open bar due to the presence of Pathin's rowdy relations. Not that we, in the groom's party were lacking for hip flasks, but it was a long night and we had taken our first pulls back before the ceremony. Dinner more than made up for it; for me this was roast beef with bacon gravy. Bacon. Fucking. Gravy. Nectar of the friggin' gods, I tell you. I've made it a mission to try to replicate its mysteries and coronary-inducing delights, as there can honestly be no purpose higher in life.

After food came dancing, as expected, and therein lies a tale of how I nearly made a gigantic ass of myself. I'm not going to be too specific here, as other parties involved may well read this and I'm not looking to embarrass anyone but myself, but here's the anonymized version.

The reception had been going on for several hours, and many had called it quits, even among the wedding party. Things had been pretty pleasant, and for me in particular were going very well indeed. The last song of the night was called, Stairway to Heaven by Led Zepplin. I don't care what you say, there's no drug, drink, pill or popper that's a more potent aphrodesiac than that song. The original idea was for the song to come on earlier when the bride and groom were out on the floor and, having secretly distributed lighters to all in attendence, one by one everyone would raise them in concert-style.

But I'm digressing here. The point of the story is that, on the dance floor for the final slow dance of the evening, I heard something. A noise I've heard before, sort of braying in its intonation. Looking around to see where it was coming from I saw it. It had been following Marissa around for most of the night, and was still on her six, but now it was looking over at me.

The drama llama. And it was looking over at me.

I took us for another swirl, maybe it was just turning its head or something.

It tilted its head, and took a half step in my direction.

Shit.

If I do this, it's going to come over here and start following me around, I thought.

So long and short aside, I turned down a sure thing. An amazing sure thing. A you-might-not-get-another-shot-at-this sure thing. I did it for the best of reasons but not so I haven't ended up second guessing myself since. The right thing to do? I don't know, honestly. But to have done otherwise would likely have lead to drama like we've not seen in some time.

But it did keep that damn llama off my doorstep, and that ain't nothing. Big Pat out.

Hang Up on the Hang Low

2007-07-28T21:40:00.000-04:00

I did something today that I used to do often back in DC, but haven't since I moved up to Boston; I went into the city and wandered around for a while. I don't like all parts of all cities, or any parts of some cities (New York and LA being the primary souless hellholes topping that list), but those parts of DC and Boston (now) that I've wandered through are entirely pleasant. The biggest drawback this weekend was that it's been in the low 90's, and fairly humid so I sweat through the shirts I was wearing in fairly short order.

I should mention that this was not just errant meandering motivated solely by my old friend the Imp of the Perverse and whatever capricious zephyrs he keeps company with, I was on a mission to find and buy a particular item of non-standard clothing. To wit, I needed me some boots and a pair of leather pants. And no, before you ask, I've not descended into some mode of deviant sexual practice (or, at least no more deviant than usual) and should not be expected to be found on the cover or between the pages of whatever naughty fetish magazine you dirty, dirty people titillate yourselves with. I am, in fact, still able to gain and maintain an erection without having an eighty year old woman in a Nazi uniform stomp on my balls repeatedly, thank you very much. The reason I'm looking to gird my loins in processed cowhide is that Dragon*Con is coming up and I need them for a costume. I freely admit to being a gigantic nerd.

At any rate, getting the boots was fairly straightforward, just needed to hit up the army-navy store. Trousers, however, proved more difficult The first place I had hoped to some had none, and the second only had ones that either had no crotch or had pin striping loudly proclaiming the wearer's affinity for violent buttsex/fisting/exhibitionist masturbating/etc; "So, what are you into," the woman behind the counter asked, to which I replied "wearing pants." Not exactly what she was looking for, I think. Given the range of clothing, both leather-based and otherwise, you'd have expected at least some standard pants but no. I have since found some other places to look, but it being Sunday right now, none of them are open.

That's not what I'm here to talk to you about, though (cue Alice's Restaurant by folk music trubador Arlo Guthrie). You've undoubtably noticed I've been even more derelict than usual in updating this here blog thing and for once it wasn't just my prediliction for heavy drinking and distractedly masturbating to the History Channel. No, it was for once a creative endeavor which I have titled The Conspiracy. Get the inside joke in the title of this post now?

This next bit is going to be really long and may go into more detail than you want to read, so feel free to skip to the end where I sum up and pen my usual sarcastic/absurdist sign-off. If you want to hear all about this Conspiracy of mine, read on.

Five months ago, back in early February, I had a dream. I've mentioned before that I dream a lot, although I don't always remember all the details of what's danced through my slumbering mind. Sometimes it's fragmented, but others can be shockingly coherent and occasionally lucid; this was one of those types. I dreamed of a world-spanning conspiracy that to all intents and purposes controlled the entirety of global civilization. I was the head of a powerful group within the conspiracy, some sort of paramilitary security force, and I knew a secret. I knew that the wife of the recently deceased head of the conspiracy had been having an illicit affair, and that her son wasn't the son of dead chairman; I revealed this in an inner conclave meeting and the widow's group fell from power as a result.

Thus the dream, but it reminded me of all the scheming and politicing we used to get up in the heyday of my larpin' days back in Montpelier. Yes, yes, Vampire is unbelievably lame and larp is for maladjusted geeks who need to develop better social skills and hygiene regimens. I know. I'm not blind to the bottom feeders that populate that particular hobby; they're one of the main reason I don't play regularly anymore (the other being that I never really liked or cared about vampire mythology or the whole boatload of pseudo-goth horseshit that comes along with it). Similarly, the live action scene back up in Burlington has fallen upon hard times and a dry season. I'm aware of a few games desultorily limping along on inertia alone, but nothing like what once was and with the involvement of very few of the veterans, many of who's pinings for a good game they could get into I've heard from time to time.

So's I gots to thinking, why the hell shouldn't I make a game of some kind out of this dream I had? Once upon a time Little Pat and I were known and, I flatter myself, reknown for the one-shot Vampire Balls we did during college, so why not see if I could rekindle some of the old fires and get the band back together? I had an idea, and plenty of time to put it all together and, I was to learn, an enthusiastic player-base starved for exactly what I was bringing to the table.

I'm not, now, going to go into intimate details of the plotline (although some of it can be found on the TrippingOverWires Forums thread devoted to same) and what actually went down on July 14th when we held game, save to say that it all came together better than I could have dreamed. Everyone had a great time, plot resolution came together near-seamlessly (despite a last-minute cancellation due to food poisoning from one of the major players) and, man, we all just had a goddamn blast. I have a hard time not being boastful about it, really (as you can probably tell), I just still am left all a'flutters over what a genuine and unqualified success it was in my mind. People are still plotting, even though game is done, solely to influence what I write for the epilogue, and also bugging me to run another one; if there's a better metric by which success can be judged, I don't know of it.

We got the band back together, man!

Independence.

2007-07-04T21:06:00.000-04:00

It's the Fourth of July and, current actions of our insultingly incompetant executive aside, I'm pretty happy being an American. We suck some times, right now being one of them, but overall it's probably better that we exist than not.

Adventures in Gravy

2007-05-13T19:21:00.000-04:00

Let's get a couple of things out in the open, that's what I'm told is healthy by every hostage negotiator I've ever had to deal with: I love to eat. I mean I love to eat. It's an almost perfect activity and probably the second best thing you can ever indulge in. I attribute not being a bloated chunkmonster as a result to regular exercise and a hyperactive metabolism.

As with many, I'm temped to say most, people who like to eat, I also positively love to cook. And of all the things I like to cook, those from which gravy* can be made rank among my favorite. Just tonight, for instance, I made chicken-fried steaks and french fries (because, you know, I might not be getting enough grease with just one or the other). I used a non-teflon pan for the steaks so as to have plenty of cracklin's and was not disappointed in that regard. Gots to have plenty of the cracklin's for a good gravy, mmhhhhmmm.**

If there's one misstep I made, ignoring for the moment the prending cardiac arrest from having eaten it at all, was to put too much salt in the flour coating mix. Made things a little too, well, salty, and I've been drinking glass after glass of water to compensate for it. But big deal, what's a little heart disease and kidney failure compared to a heaping plate of down-home fried protein and starch?

Let me close by passing along public service announcement from the American Gravy Advisory Board, who remind you all to drink at least one glass of gravy daily. Gravy: it's good for your digestion or something.

Seriously I cannot believe I ate all that, jesus fucking christ I'm full. Big Pat out, and likely in search of an antacid.

*It is perhaps telling that the only two periodicals I read regularly are Guns and Ammo and Gravy Enthusiast. Never Gravy Connoisseur though, that rag's a bought-out propaganda piece for Big Gravy.

**For best enjoyment of the preceeding sentence, imagine it spoken in a thick Cajun/Billy Bob Thorton accent.

I've Been Through Diamonds, I've Been Through Minks; I've Been Through it All,

2007-02-14T19:20:00.000-05:00

Love stinks.

The Warriors of Gallahar

2006-12-21T19:09:00.000-05:00

The title for this update come to you courtesy of Josh and Kristine's* wedding of earlier this month; I'm told spectacularly bad handwriting was the cause of my last name being misspelled on my reception placemarker, making it more reminscent of any generically sci-fi berserker race than everyone's favorite wisecrackin' freelance historian and man of action. Considering the bar was open and had plenty of scotch, I was in as forgiving and jovial a mood as I ever get anyway.

Been a couple things I've been meaning to put up here, beyond a typo vaguely reminiscent of smell long-haired barbarians waving axes about. Firstly I've been working at this joint out in Waltham called Unica. They make business software and I contracted on for a month n' change to update their customer database. It's not a bad gig, and pays disproportionately well for what they ask of me, plus the fridge gets restocked weekly.

Secondly, and of considerably more importance, my car's bit the dust. In case you've either forgotten what it looks like or never seen it at all, It normally looks like this. Picture's from back when I was down in DC, before you ask. Technically, it still looks the same, only I can't use it anymore. Maybe I should start at the beginning.

My car's needed a new muffler for some time now, so a week before Thanksgiving I took it into a Meineke to get a new one slapped on before making the jaunt up to Vermont. They lifted it up and called me over, "can't use a cutting torch here, gotta gas leak," the man said, rendolent with the perfume of cheap cigars and job-related stress, pointing at the junction where fuel line met tank. Sure enough, there was a slight trickle of dampness there. Shit.

He cited fire insurance reasons why they couldn't do gas line repairs as they brought the lift down and started her up, to take her outside. It was a few moments after one of the shop mooks had driven her up to the door I noticed the slick he was leaving behind. Not a couple drops, as the leak they'd shown me warranted, but a honest to god fuel trail, the sort a gritty silver-screen antihero would flick his cigarette into after making the appropriate quip to eliminate a fleeing supervillain.

Laughing Boy saw it a moment after I did, and we both took a knee to check for the source. Looking underneath, I could see fuel spraying from below the engine compartment; apparently the line had chosen that particular startup to blow clear off its mount. Chuckles decided, shortly thereafter, to effect a patch job on it despite the insurance violation on the condition I got the line itself fixed permanent before doing any real driving.

Fast forward until a few days before Thanksgiving. I've gotten my car to a full service mechanic and give them a call at noon to find out what they're going to soak me to transform her back from a deathtrap into a piece of crap. They tell me it's much worse than just the lines, that they were hesitant even to put it on the lifts as they feared it would break in have and fall into two seperate parts on either side. The frame's rotted through and the floorboards are about to give way, they tell me. It's simultaneously kicked the bucket, bit the big one, bought the farm and got the chop. Limp it home, they tell me, it's
likely to end badly should I continue to drive it around. Fuck.

So twelve years and a hundred thirty thousand miles in, my first car's dead. Scrappers are hauling it off in exchange for a pittance on Saturday. At the moment I can get along without wheels, but I can't imagine I won't end up getting a new ride eventually. More on that when it becomes relevant, so don't touch that dial.

*Yeah, I know, myspace is the domain of pedophiles, crappy bands and emo dipshits, but it's the only web presence either of them have that I know of.

Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves.

2006-11-05T20:48:00.000-05:00

Big Pat is filmed before a live studio audience, except for when times they try to make a run for it, in which case the audience is usually dead.

I've really not been doing much of interest lately. I'm working an idiot temp job that consists entirely of scanning legal docs and making sure I'm wearing pants. One of these two things I'm much more diligent about than the other.

The sole upside of being nominally employed in a semi-menial fashion is it gives the mind plenty of time to wander, meander and basicaly tear-ass around of its own voltion, while the body goes through whatever motions are required. This isn't the waste of time it might otherwise seem; about fifty percent of all my good ideas come from this sort of idle musing when I ought to be paying attention to whatever the hell I'm actually doing. The lesser of these include the completion of the latest session of my ongoing Technocracy game, as well as other game-related nonsense.

Of more importance, or at least significance is this: I've decided to go back in for my doctorate. I've been dodging this since, well, before I even finished my masters, but let's be honest here: was there ever all that much doubt I'd end up in academia?

There's still a ton of details to work out as to the how of it, but I've at least got the if settled. It might take a while, but it'll be Dr. Big Pat before too much longer.

Great, He's Talking about Skating Again. Large Animal Tranquilizers, Don't Fail Us Now.

2006-09-25T17:19:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned before about the time I've ever appeared graceful is when I'm skating.* What I haven't brought up is how relative a statement that is.

The overwhelming majority of people that skate learned in one of three styles: figure, speed or hockey, ranked in terms of decending gracefulness. Figure skaters are, without question, the most refined of us. They move with a clarity and poise that, in all honesty, is closer to complex ballroom dancing that anything else. They can do that heel-to-heel thingy where you have both blades in a straight line; how one can stand that way, let alone skate, without shattering both ankles is a mystery to me.

The style of speed skaters is all designed around, well, speed. Its grace (and speed) come from its minimalism, the control and lack of redundant movement. Of course it helps that their blades are longer than anyone elses, but man once these guys get moving it's really something else.

Then there's hockey skating, what I do. Speed skaters are learjets streaking across the sky, hockey skaters are a fleet of B-17s carpet bombing Dresden. Where figure skaters are graceful as thoroughbred jumpers, hockey skaters churn along like a mechanized panzer assault (the results when the two meet, incidentally, isn't all that different, either).

In isolation we look pretty good, but put us next to either of the other two and you'll reveal the bare functionality of hockey skating; It's there to get a heavily armored goon up to ramming speed, quick n' dirty, no more, no less.

But still, it's all I know and I still look less horribly uncoordinated doing it than, well, most other things. Stay tuned this frequency for all your Big Pat news.

*It is possible that, due to either fetal alcohol syndrome or massive head trauma, that when I say "skating" you mistakenly think "skateboarding." As evidenced both by being literate and possessing the ability to count past three without compulsory brow-furrowing and expletive-uttering I am clearly not a skateboarder.

A Journey of a Thousand Miles Usually Involves Getting Lost and Chased by an Angry Mob.

2006-09-06T22:05:00.000-04:00

This past weekend I sojourned, in company with Mike, Deja, Little Pat and Johnoghue, to Atlanta. Normally I'd only ever go to that city to burn it to the ground again, but this time I was there for Dragon Con so I was prevailed upon to dispense with the incendiarism. Plus it rained on Saturday and I couldn't get anything to catch.

I was a late addition to the group, taking the spot of a last minute flake-out. And so, last Thursday, began (drumroll) the Road to DragonCon.

Mapquest told us it would be 19 hours, as we were driving. It took closer to 24, although thankfully I was able to sleep through a large part of the way down, losing consciousness north of DC and awaking the next morning somewhere in North Carolina. Mike drove most of the way, buoyed up by pills and his festering madness. If I ever needed another reason to loath South Carolina, it was the repeated and numerous billboard for discount fireworks, drive-through liquor stores and adult-themed truck stops along the roadside; free showers for truckers, free STDs for all!

The con itself was, well, amazing. It took up three major hotels (the Hyatt Regency, Marquis Marriott and Hilton) and was in all ways a massive affair. Much costuming took place, including Vader's Own 501st Stormtrooper Legion, a half dozen Aeon Flux's (Some more convincingly attired than the rest), Colonial Space Marines (with a cute widdle plush face-hugger) and more jedi than you could shake a stick at. As a result, I'm certain in a million of different photographs I can be found walking through the background. Not the sort of immortality I'd have preferred, but I'll take what I can get. Things were hampered a bit by a head cold I was fighting the first two days, but by Sunday it had largely abated. If nothing else, I can take some perverse comfort in being the likely vector for many post-con illnesses.

We departed on Monday, around noon. On the train out to where we'd parked, a random person started a conversation with Johnaghue about the new Transformers movie, having seen him carrying swag from the convention. On the way back up, I fell asleep just south of Richmond, Virginia, to awaken on the near side of the George Washington in New York. Apparently, while I was asleep, we'd made an unintentional detour to Philladelphia of all places, due to some confusion over where the Jersey Turnpike is I95 and where it is not. Made it back to my place in just under 24 hours as a result of that, and no one being awake enough to stay behind the wheel for any length of time without endangering all our lives, or at least without doing so more than usual.

It was, to date, the longest road trip I've been on since childhood, and surely one of the most memorable. Fun as it was, next time I go, if I ever go again, I'm flying. Big Pat out.

Say it With Me, Randy: Fuck the Aztecs!

2006-08-21T23:41:00.000-04:00

Gather 'round children, it's time for an update, as well as an unbelievably painful series of tentus shots!

I've been in Boston (Somerville, specifically) for a couple weeks now, which has been almost enough time to recover from the hellish, nay, apocalyptically epic trip up here, which I will now relate. This is about how the South didn't want to let me escape, and sent its many demons to plague and perturb me attempt to get back to New England. For those of you in need of even more dramatic emphasis, may I suggest Carl Orf's Oh Fortuna.

It took a couple of hours to load up the pickup and trailer on the morning of the 4th, and then my father and I were ready to set off; he drove the truck and I tailed in the Deathmobile. As usual, we had to stop a couple time to retie the tarp over the trailer as it worked itself loose. It's important to note that originally I was just going to rent a box truck and tow my car behind it, which as we shall see would have been infinitely superior to how things actually tumbled out.

Around four in the afternoon, as we entered Connecticut, the storm which had been threatening for hours broke, and broke with a fury similar to that which will one day end the world of man. For a couple hours it was, I can only presume and for once not exaggerate, like driving inside a fishbowl. A really murky, windy and storm-tossed fishbowl being carried by a hyperactive eight year old with a penchant for breakdancing and a lot of distractions. I maintained contact with the truck solely by following the increasingly indistinct red glow of the tail lights, tormented not only by the difficulties of staying on the road but also by imagining all my stuff in truck/on the trailer getting soaked despite the tarps.

The storm finally ended and things dried off. I began to feel marginally positive again; in the slipstream surely things would dry off a bit, I thought. As we came into the homestretch on the Mass Pike, I noticed my headlights were dimmer than they ought to be. Glancing down, an idiot light I'd never seen below was light up on the control panel, it read "charge battery," and the voltage dial was dropping faster than Freddy Mercury's white blood cell count.

I barely made it off the Pike before losing power entirely. The tow truck took over an hour (thanks for the timely response, triple A), and by the time my father and I staggered to my new place it was past midnight. Unloading took another hour and change, and I ended up having to sleep on Mike's airbed as mine was too wet for use.

The airbed deflated during the night, naturally.

At any rate, I'm here now, my stuff's all dried out, my alternator's repaired, and Dixie can kiss my Yankee ass. Despite all that, for my usual irrational reasons, I conclude that the ghosts of the Confederacy threw at me, I'm out and clear, and can't think of a reason ever to move back down there again. Rebel scum.

Well Other Than That, How Was the Theatre, Mrs. Lincoln?

2006-06-27T16:25:00.000-04:00

Whenever asked "what is happiness, Big Pat," before, my answer was usually "a full bandolier." It still is, much of the time. This Saturday past, however, I went to the Old Dominion Beer Festival and discovered a new answer.

Happiness is munching a bacon cheeseburger and drinking really good free beer, while watching two hot chicks laughing at their inability to get their umbrella open, oblivious or uncaring that they're both wearing white t-shirts in the sudden downpour.

It had been threatening all day, but didn't let go until around four in the afternoon, by which time I'd sampled many a tasty brew. You had to trade them these little $1 tokens for each drink, and I'd only bought five to begin with, but the beer gods must've been smiling on me for as soon as I got down to one left I kept finding dropped tokens on the ground. Glad I didn't drive, would have been a shame to not use them.

It Was Trillby!

2006-05-30T00:41:00.000-04:00

Previously, on Big Pat:

A montage of everything I've been up to since I left Vermont for DC two years ago, likely set to some pounding metal tune, or maybe techno. Also, lots of things explode to emphasis key moments.

And now, on Big Pat...

Graduation was a couple weekends ago, as expected the two-day ceremony was a massive cluster fuck of disorganized grabassitude. We spent the preparatory half hour milling about while those who were supposed to get us organized were either unable to find their ass with both hands and a flashlight, or were too busy huffing aerosol fumes to bother. The one is as likely as the other, from what I can tell.

On the up side, I was given a bitchin' pen in liue of my diploma, which ought to arrive in the mail within a week or so, and also George Bush the Elder was our guest speaker. Hindsight redeems more presidential legacies than it doesn't.

This past weekend I made the trek back to Burlington for Memorial Day, specifically for a barbeque at Beth's joint. Beef, beer, and berating retards, it was about all I could ask for.

The question that everyone is asking at the moment is what I'm going to do next, and I'm running out of was to dodge it creatively. Short term, I'm probably moving to Boston while looking for work and/or doctoral programs. Long term? Wing it and see what happens, wait for the moment to come and then strike. In other words, the usual which isn't all that usual at all.

This is Big Pat signing off and remember, that light at the end of the tunnel is probably an oncoming train.

When All is Done He Will Tower Over the Wasteland and Call out to the Stars...

2006-04-28T21:55:00.000-04:00

..that at long last the thing is accomplished.

Oh God...Cr...Crab Battle...

2006-03-23T22:41:00.000-05:00

Sit down and strap in, it's update time on Big Pat.

This past week was spring break, not that it particularly mattered since I don't have any classes this semester. I needed to go to VT for a while anyway for the final stage of research for my thesis, so northward bound was I. A working vacation wouldn't have been that bad, had not Little Pat, that bastard, been in plague carrier mode when I got to Burlington. As a result, two days later I came down with the worst case of the flu I've had in years. Sweet jesus was it bad, I friggin' tell you.

Anyway, on St. Patrick's Day I wasn't that bad off yet, so I could still enjoy the party at the Condo for which we made Rocket Fuel (usually a once-a-year treat). The party itself was...different from what we usually do in a number of ways I see no need to go into here. Suffice it to say, it served as showcase for several changes and evolving situations that I'm still uncertain about. Things are changing on a number of previously stable fronts, and I'm not sure they are doing so for the better. Scratch that, I am sure at least one is not for the best, the others I withhold judgement on for now.

Regardless, the project is nearing completion. I've got a little more to write tomorrow and then the editing process begins. Editing is the final stage before I turn this bad boy over to my readers to be torn apart along with my confidence and sense of self-worth. After making whatever changes they recommend (presuming one of their recommendations isn't "stop writing and never show your face around here again"), I turn it in and the interminable waiting anxiety begins. I plan to deal with that via a healthy course of videogames, hard drinking and gun violence. Stay tuned for all the exciting details.

I've had the Blue, the Reds and the Pinks,

2006-02-15T00:19:00.000-05:00

One thing for sure,
Love stinks.

May 5th, 1864: I Was Taken Prisoner Today

2006-02-09T22:27:00.000-05:00

On the fifth of May, 1864 Sergeant George R. Crosby of the 1st Vermont Cavalry was taken prisoner by confederate forces during the preliminary screening movements of Grant's Wilderness Campaign. The majority of the next year he spent in Andersonville prison, surviving chronic diareah, "the rheumatis," barebones rations and raiders before being paroled in late December due to illness.

The reason I bring this up is that for the last month or so I've been transribing and annotating Sgt Crosby's war diaries. I've got his 1863, 1864 and 1865 diaries; according to family legend* there were supposedly an 1861 and an 1862 diary as well, since lost to time. It's all down on paper, and at this moment I flatter myself that I know more of his life than anyone else living today. Seeing as no one else has ever transcribed his diaries before, that isn't saying much admittedly.

The plan at the moment is to have a draft of all this done by the end of the month, presuming I can keep to schedule. I still need to finish annotating the whole deal, and write an introductory essay of about twenty pages or so as to why this matters and the context of a Vermonter fighting for the cause of the Union. If I'm particularly lucky, I may even finish it all on time without going completely insane. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to deal with a time where men routinely had beards and died of gangrene.

*Those of you that know will have by now noticed that my middle name is the same as the sergeant's last, so I'll concede the point: he's my great-great-great grandfather on my mother's side. These diaries have been kicking around for just about forever and I'm not the first to try to transcribe them, although I am the first to succeed.

You Know What?

2006-01-24T01:35:00.000-05:00

Fuck Ebaumsworld. Fuck those assholes right in the ass. They've been stealing content and watermarking it as their own for some time now, and I've been derelict in not mentioning it here. So now I have, and with any luck Baumen and all his ilk will deal with any measure of unpleasantry for being the cocksuckers they are. Big Pat out.

All Quiet on the Western Front

2006-01-08T18:53:00.000-05:00

I'm riding on the final swells of winter break at the moment, roughly a week left before I have to get back to DC and back to work. This past semester was a busy one or, to put it more susinctly, it was pure fucking hell during the final month. As always, I managed to skid burning across the finish line. All my grades save one are in, and I've done quite well so far; the qualification comes that the most important of my classes is the one that hasn't been graded yet. More on that in a future post.

Christmas was the usual mix of pleasantness, familial reacquaintance, and struggle to keep for beating my brother into a quivering, bloody pulp. About two days of his company is about all I can take before I can't stand his mindless blathering anymore. Never has anyone spoken so much, which saying so little and thinking less.

The real fun came, as it always does, when I went over to Burlington for New Years. The party was at Jamie's condo this year, with a large crowd attending and masks being required for admittence. Jamie got bombed out of his goddamn mind, which was fun to watch at the time although I think he regrets it now. Any night when I'm not the biggest ass in the room is a good night by my reckoning.

Currently I'm sitting at the keyboard of a second cousin in Colorado, having been skiing in the Rockies the past three days. I'm alive and unhurt, which is all I ever expected from this trip, so go me. Skiing is fun, slamming into a jack pine at 40mph isn't.

This has been a pretty disjointed post. I attribute it to how exhausted I am from all the skiing and driving back to Denver from Copper Mountain in a snow storm. More exciting adventures to come, don't touch that dial.

The Answer to Life's Questions is Kitchenware

2005-11-27T19:49:00.000-05:00

There's always been a number of questions I've had about human interactions. The only one relevant to this post is what couples talk about after they've known each other for years, married and grown old together and all that. When two people know one another that inimately, to the point where they have no remaining secrets and can almost predict what they're going to say before they say it, what is there still to talk about?

This weekend, I found out.

It's spatulas.

I was home for Thanksgiving, as usual, and while eating breakfast got to watch the entertaining spectacle of my parents trying to figure out between them how many spatulas they had. My father started the discussion by asking if they only had two, which my mother replied that they infact had four; three were at that moment visible, although to be fair the third was obscured from my father's vision by the way I was sitting.

Since I know you're dying to know, the ultimate answer turned out to be five, there were two more in a drawer. This wasn't discovered for at least twenty minutes, though, as I got to listen to my parents go back and forth about the when and the where of all the spatulas they'd bought over the years and whether they still owned them.

They've been married since the mid-70s, a few years before I was born as I recall. That's a lot of spatulas.

There's a Calvin and Hobbes strip out there that this might all bring to mind, it certainly did for me. In it Calvin's father rambles on about how mall escalators used to be narrower and have wood slats. The punchline comes when Calvin thinks to himself, "I'd hate to think the sum total of my life's experiences are to become stories with no point" or something very close to that.

Spatulas.

Seriously.

War of Northern Aggression my Goddamn Ass you Southern Apologist Sacks of Shit.

2005-10-16T22:30:00.000-04:00

For reasons of both class research paper and by MA thesis I've been back at the National Archives a lot lately. That's part of the reason I've not updated much recently, the other part is that I hate you all.

If there's one thing I've learned from pouring over all these Civil War service records it's that men in the nineteenth century liked barely-comprehensible cursive script and had only a casual relationship with spelling and grammar. The latter I already knew as public education was only available back then in New England (and not uniformly even there), the former was somewhat expected. I was hoping, somewhat forlornly, that at some point after the war someone in the War department would have typed up these record so to make them more legible; already knowing the parlous budget and general inert state of the War Department between the Civil War and, debatably, the Great War (with one minor surge of activity when we decided to kick the crap out of Spain for TOTALLY LEGITIMATE AND NOT MANUFACTURED REASONS), this didn't come as huge surprise. It does, however, suck to try to try to decipher vaguely legible script over a century and a half faded.

Other than these technical problems, walking on sunshine, happy as both a clam and a pig in shit and any other colloquialisms to be back doing Civil War research; as much as I love working with the twentieth century World Wars I'm tired of having to deal with all the Cold War crap they lead into. I believe I've mentioned it before, but American history at George Washington University is ridiculously Cold War heavy at the moment and that ain't my bag, baby. The other main reason I'm happy to be doing Civil War is that I can totally throw down on the romantic/addlepated schmucks that defend the Confederacy on moral ground.

It was all about slavery.

At the time they openly avowed it was all about slavery.

To claim it was not all about slavery is to completely ignore the written record of virtually every southerner that spoke out at the time of the 1850's crisis.

Blacks weren't people to them, they openly swore to not live in a nation where they were. Your ancestors were shitheads, get over it.

The Hero of Canton

2005-09-25T22:07:00.000-04:00

....the man they call Jayne.

You scored as Jayne Cobb. The Mercenary. You are in this for the money, plain as that. You like things simple that way, but mainly as anything else confuses you. You get the job done, and don't care what people think. Not as long as you get paid anyway.

Jayne Cobb

100%

The Operative

69%

River Tam

56%

Kaylee Frye

44%

Inara Serra

44%

Zoe Alleyne Washburne

38%

Hoban 'Wash' Washburne

31%

Simon Tam

31%

Shepherd Derrial Book

25%

Capt. Mal Reynolds

13%

Which Serenity character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Mungo City, Where are You?

2005-09-01T20:12:00.000-04:00

People have poked fun at my stinginess in the past, with some justification. I don't like spending money, even on things that I either need or want. It comes from not being comfortable without having a certain base amount of money on hand, which in turn comes from the dubiously legendary Gallagher Cheapass Gene. It weakens with each passing generation, or so it seems to me: My father has gone as far as to calculate how much it costs to drive each car he has owned per mile, my paternal grandfather didn't spring for a radio in his pickup truck until the early 1980's.

The point is I've needed new toe wheels for my inline skates for a while now (frankly, I'm surprised they didn't physically fail on me the last time I went out on the old ones) and haven't bought them until a few days ago. Having replaced the bad ones, it's amazing the level of performance I have now; it's night and day the difference they've made.

For the most part I don't give a flying fuck about sports, and exercise solely as I know I need to else I become a vaguely humanoid blob that sucks in ham and pizza and spits out historical trivia and sarcasm. Skating, however, is the one thing I genuinely look forward to doing. It's the speed element. On a good straightaway on good pavement I get going upwards of 20 - 30 mph, faster than I'd usually drive in the same place. I should be wearing pads and a helmet but I don't for reasons various legitimate and moronic, so if I fall I'm in for a hell of an injury so my brain should be running in overdrive, scanning constantly for rocks and sticks and other obstacles as well as cars that may not notice me. Once I get up to speed though, it all drops away. I don't think about how my legs are burning from the effort, how my lungs are straining to pull in enough oxygen or the million other things I should be paying attention to, it might as well be happening to someone else. It's certainly not me that's one mistake away from a horrible case of road rash, I'm tearing up the road like there's no tomorrow. I could even go faster if I needed to, I'm unstoppable, a living, breathing cruise missile beyond anyone's control as I blast through residential neighborhoods leaving joggers and even bicyclists sucking my turbulence. It's the closest I can envision flying would be like, being free and fast and unstoppable, the world blurring away on either side, no one able to react in time to you before you're gone, a figure diminishing in the distance. Any second a car might back out of a driveway unexpectedly or a rock get jammed in the wheels, sending me hurtling to the asphalt, but it never does because I'm too fast and sharp and quick for anything to get me, to stop me, to kill me. It's exhiliration taken pure, its only downside being that it can't last, eventually I'll have to stop, catch my breath, turn around and head home.

So yeah, I really like skating.

Comfortably Dumb

2005-08-21T00:36:00.000-04:00

Summer's approaching its end and I'm at loose ends. Nothing came of the Discovery Channel job I tried for, despite my inspired performance* during the audition. As a result I've been working at a law firm out in Reston, VA the last couple of months. It's a decent enough gig, if not terribly challenging. I can't speak for the actual attorneys, as I didn't much work with any directly, but I can't say I was terribly impressed with either the paralegals or secretaries. They all seemed so...boring.

I dunno, maybe it's just that I'm a twitchy lunatic constantly overflowing with nervous energy, but almost all the people I've worked with this summer had no real spark to them, no drive, no great ambition forcing them to achieve better things. At least vaguely overweight, they all seem so...slow. Unmotivated. Careerist. Resigned. As if they'd all accepted that they weren't going to attain anything better. Plus they kept taking smoke breaks throughout the day, the lazy fuckoffs.

Well whatever, I'm done with that now and left with them begging me to stay longer. My goal at any job is to have them miss me when I'm gone, and I'm certain I achieved that this time. Classes start at the end of the month, the current plan is to go insane grinding through the rest of the credit hours I have in my program, as well as start the preliminaries of my thesis and, should megalomania levels stay high enough, work on German for my foreign language exam. At the very least I shouldn't be bored.

That's all for now, stay tuned for partial excitement after these important messages.

Today

2005-08-10T20:51:00.000-04:00

Naa naa, na na, Hey! Na na na na

Naa naa, na na, Hey! Na na na na

doo doo chee doo doo doo chee, doo doo doo chee doo doo doo chee

Naa naa, na na, Hey! Na na na na

Naa naa, na na, Hey! Na na na na

doo doo chee doo doo doo chee, doo doo doo chee doo doo doo chee

Naa naa, na na, Hey! Na na na na

Naa naa, na na, Hey! Na na na na

doo doo chee doo doo doo chee, doo doo doo chee doo doo doo chee

Naa naa, na na, Hey! Na na na na

Naa naa, na na, Hey! Na na na na

doo doo chee doo doo doo chee, doo doo doo chee doo doo doo chee

Naa naa, na na, Hey! Na na na na

Naa naa, na na, Hey! Na na na na

This is My Rifle. There are Many Like it but this One is Mine.

2005-08-01T19:46:00.000-04:00

Man I love shootin' things. I mean seriously, give me a weapon, a box of ammo and no responsible adult supervision and you're pretty much guaranteed I'm going to destroy something. As an American I recognize my primary advantage lies in being as heavily armed as possible at all times, and in that spirit I attended (drumroll) the National Gun Show yesterday out at the Dulles Expo Center.

The show was among the classiest I've ever been to. To begin with it was indoors and thus lacking the redneck flea-market feel other shows I've been to have had. In this vein, it also was filled primarily with serious collectors/shooter who were there out of their love of firearms, not the derobed Klan type you often find in, err, more rural types of shows.

Anyway, once getting my hand stamped and a ziptie run through the trigger and bolt of my rifle (brought so I could find a case to fit it), I was off like a kid in a candy store. Regrettably, this particular over-armed nutcase forgot his camera, as he usually does, and so I've no pictures to delight you with. That having been said, the highlights of the show were:

Volcanic Repeater: This lever action pistol was the forerunner of the Henry/Winchester rifle. I've never seen one outside a museum, as few were ever made. Speaking of the Henry rifle,

Henry Rifles #2, 15, 16: These incredibly finished Henry rifles are the second, fifteenth and sixteenth ever made for production by the Winchester Arms company. For you non-gun nuts that's roughly the equivalent of finding a signed, first edition copy of Oliver Twist in mint condition.

Triple Barrelled 9 Gauge: This is seriously the biggest shoulder arm I've ever seen. Punt guns (shotguns of 8 gauge and lower) are bigger, but then they're closer to artillery than shotguns anyway. It was a black powder muzzle loader, so it wouldn't have been as horrible to fire as the gauge would otherwise indicate but christ, 9 gauge?

Intratech TEC-9: Alright I admit it, I included this as a comedy entry as, frankly, the concept of the assault pistol is a ludicrous one anyway and the TEC-9 is near the bottom of the heap in even that dubious classification. Later in the show a minority suspect-err, attendee bought it, which I swear to christ I neither made up nor claim in any way casts minorities in a criminal light. Goddamn PC requirements...

G-3/Mauser Gewer98/Kar98: *Ahem*; Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Über alles in der Welt, Wenn es stets zu Schutz und Trutze Brüderlich zusammenhält, Von der Maas bis an die Memel, Von der Etsch bis an den Belt...

Lots of surplus AK-47/M/74s, SKS and Mosin-Nagants: The collapse of the Warsaw pact pays off yet again with tons of Soviet weapons on the open market! If I had more disposable cash or the Mosin-Nagants had been in better condition (all the inexpensive ones needed a lot of refinishing work) I'd have grabbed one of the People's Weapons without hesitation, comrade.

There were of course untold numbers of interesting weapons I've not mentions as, honestly, this post is already getting longer than I had planned. However I haven't told you about most amazing weapon I saw there, the Best in Show. It was,

The Panzerfaust: Yeah, you read that right, a goddamn Panzerfaust, the progenitor of all rocket propelled grenades! This war trophy capture by some lucky GI is an example of the mass-produced one-shot antitank weapon that was, among other things, the bane of Allied and Soviet tankers in the latter half of WWII. During the Battle of Berlin these weapons were used by Hitler Youth (boys younger than the draft age of 16) as well as Volksturm militia (people rise up and storm break loose my ass, Joseph), Waffen SS and Wehrmacht troops against Soviet armor. Being a single-use weapon very few have survived to this day, making the one I saw an incredible find, and completely made my day. Pity it wasn't for sale.

Then again it's probably better for all of us that I don't have access to antiarmor weapons.

You cannot conceive of how hard it was to type that last sentence.

This Probably Isn't Interesting

2005-07-21T21:16:00.000-04:00

Stuck in traffic on my way back from work today, I reflected on something as the fifth jerk in a row shot past the line I was in for the exit, turn signal indicating he was trying to cut ahead of us poor mortals who weren't stupendous assholes: There aren't enough interesting people in the world. Strike that, there may be, but I haven't made contact with them. I have a fair amount of friends, all of whom I consider interesting; being interesting is pretty much a prerequisite if I'm going to make friends with someone. However, I've had very little luck finding interesting people since moving down here to DC.

Don't get me wrong, I have met a few, as well as a larger number of people who are pleasant enough, but most of those don't fit my definition of interesting. I can't see any of them smashing an egg into their forehead during a job interview, or tear-assing down residential streets on children's bicycles, or even aspiring to spraypaint the word "Hammertime!" on stop signs. If given the opportunity to do something that was both incredibly impressive and massively stupid, I'd imagine most of them would decide that acheiving immortality wasn't worth the temporary embarrasment of, say, running across a back road in a gorilla suit in plain view of a stopped car.

Take the people I work with at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati (massive, faceless legal monolith). I've no real complainst about any of them, but I see in them the same sort of, well, boring mundanity that seems par for the course; they generally follow sports or soap operas, as gender roles dicate, and lead lives of quiet submission, as opposed to desperation (which I believe I've mentioned I prefer loud anyway). But hey, I could be wrong here. Hell, I behave at work, both as they've not gotten used to me enough for me to get away with my usual shenanigans and also given the current atmosphere of general unease in America these days should I show up in a gas mask with a bucket labelled "flesh-eating beetles" they'd probably call the MiB's to haul me away. For all I know my coworkers do all sorts of interesting things that they don't talk about in mixed company. Or maybe they really are just boring stiffs.

Anyway, working again makes me wonder just what the hell I'm going to end up doing longterm as a career. I love history and am great at it, but I don't want to teach. Likewise there's a lot of other things I can do pretty well if I need to but I sure as shit don't want to get stuck on in generic white-collar employment. Sure as fuck I don't want to do tech support again. I need to find something to do with myself to cover the expenses of living without turning me into a wage slave or robbing me of the time and motivation my Sinister Secret Projects demand.

I was right, this entry isn't that interesting after all.

Science Rules.

2005-07-10T15:13:00.000-04:00

Now With Real Bone-Crunching Action

2005-06-05T21:09:00.000-04:00

Alright, seriously, what the hell am I doing here? I've done a couple piddly ass temp jobs so far this summer that have paid minimally, and my immediate prospects of getting steady, decent paying work is crap. This is starting to resemble a George Thurogood song, only with less bourbon, scotch and beer. I think.

The big problem I've always had is I like having both money to buy the things I want and time in which to enjoy them, the acquisition of which are mutually unattainable. If I'm working fulltime my naturally spartan existence lets me rack up cash fairly quickly, but I have little time and less motivation to do anything so it all just sits in my bank account. If I'm part-timin' it or being a full-fledged bum I've got tons of time and motivation, but no capital to finance my wacky adventures. Much like, oh I don't know, every other person on the planet, I'd much prefer to have limitless resources and free time to do with as I please.

The weather was remarkably nice today, so I went rollerblading; my legs, still unhappy with the moving job I worked on Saturday, are not currently appreciative of my efforts at exercise and good health. It is nice to be down to 170lbs again, although it looks like this is as low as I go without doing something insane like sawing a limb off or, even worse, giving up beer. It's a good thing too, the implacable march of time is wearing more on me with each passing day; got my hair cut a couple days ago and was surprised in the amount of grey there was in the cut hair. I'd say I feel pretty odd for feeling ancient at 25, if I didn't know virtually all of my friends of the same age feel the same.

That's all I've got at the moment. You're listening to KBPT radio, all Big Pat, all the time: you keep on rockin' and I'll keep on rolling.

If You Only Knew The Power of the Dark Side

2005-05-21T00:50:00.000-04:00

Sit down and strap yourselves in, I'm going into hardcore Star Wars geek mode, with more fullblown high-octane nerdery than your pathetic minds may be able to handle.

Given how badly George Lucas has shit on my childhood, I broke with tradition this week; I didn't see the new Star Wars movie on its special midnight showing on the first day it played. I went to both Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones on the first time each of them played, but no more. I waited a bit, and saw it at 9:45PM of Thursday, June 19th, slightly under twenty four hours since it opened.

I remember the excitement of Phantom Menace when it opened. My friend Brent and Pathin stood in line all night to get us the tickets, and we all showed up hours ahead of time, to join the line of slightly-more deranged fans who had beat us there. Tom wore full Darth Maul makeup, there were Stormtroopers present, the mood was right. In the theater I think I can remember the entirety of Burlington geekdom without exception, all rarin' for the first new Star Wars in twenty years; some of the oldest of us could remember seeing the originals in theaters, myself I can only hazily remember being scared of the Sarlac in Return of the Jedi back then, being that I was all of four at the time. When the lights dimmed on Phantom Menace and John Williams music stated, the roar of us all drowned it out for a few minutes and for two hours I was lost in the magic of the moment. Walking out of the theater, we all raved about how great it was, how we had so looked forward to it and it had fulfilled our desires.

Two days later a profound depression set over Burlington as the moment wore off and we began to think about it rationally. It wasn't long before someone had the courage to speak what we all knew: Phantom Menace had sucked, and it had sucked badly.

Attack of the Clones came and went, and it was better than Phantom, all but Ian, who is a right idiot sometimes, agreed. Not up to the standards of the original trilogy, not even close, but better than the atrocity of Phatom Menace. And now, as of two days ago, the final one played, and the saga is complete.

Revenge of the Sith is not a bad Star Wars tale, although at times it tries mightily to be so. Much of the dialogue is horrendous. Not bad, not terrible, but abysmal; this is almost exclusively when Anakin and Padme are talking to each other and christ almighty does it suck. To make matters worse, they talk alot, too often in my opinion. The special effects as before rely much too heavily on CG and it shows. Industrial Light and Magic used to be world-class in special effects and they rely much too heavily on computers doing the work for them these days and the movie is weaker for it.

One man almost entirely makes up most of the difference though, and that man is Emperor Palpatine. Bless his twisted, evil little soul, that blackhearted bastard shines gloriously in Revenge of the Sith. His lines are pure gold almost without exception, his inflection appropriately evil when it's needed to be and his acting flawless; he's evil but more than that he's convincingly evil, you're never left wanting explanation as to why he does anything at all. The Emperor steals the show, and it badly needed stealing. Also impressive is how it remained canon with the Clone Wars cartoon shorts that aired on Cartoon Network between this movie and the previous one. It added a lot of authenticity to see that Grievous was still injured from his tussle with Mace Windu and Anakin bore his scars from his trial in the cave.

Nevertheless, there was slightly more wrong with the movie than there was right. I didn't care for Anakin had an "excuse" for his fall into darkness, Vader should have been born of selfish negativity, not doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. The bit about Obi Wan being able to commune with Qui Gon Jinn's spirit at the end felt entirely tacked on and inappriopriate as well.

In the end, it's the best of the first three but still far behind the original trilogy. I felt a little let down on leaving the theater, both as the movie wasn't as good as it could be as that it was the final one and Lucas was now never going to redeem himself. Star Wars has been a journey I've been on for my entire life, and now it's over. I feel this way often when I'm done watching a movie or series or finished with a series of books that I've really enjoyed; I'm always left wanting more, wanting to stay in the world, for their to be more adventures, for it not all to be done. It is done though, as horribly low of an opinion of Lucas as I hold I can't see even him making more movies. So it's over, it's finished, and on an uneven note at that.

Ah screw it, I'll always have The Empire Strikes Back to watch, to remind me of the glory that was and could have been again. You have controlled your fear, now release your anger! Embracing the dark side of the force, I leave you now.

A Magical Tale for the Whole Family!

2005-05-13T23:29:00.000-04:00

Due to a delivery error on the part of some idiot in shipping, out there in the world somewhere, I had to drive out to Alexandria today to pick up a package UPS couldn't seem to get to me. When I got out to the parking lot, ready to head out on this merry time-wasting mission, I noticed my car was a different color than usual. Normally my car is a fairly deep blue, but today it had a distinct yellow tint to it, as if the cocaine fairies had lovingly dusted it in lemon-scented Columbian blow. In reality it just means it's pollen season, when plants everywhere take their revenge on allergic mammels by jizzing into the air continually. Lousy damn plants.

My last paper of the semester is nearing completion, which is good considering it's due first thing Monday morning. For a last minute lash up job, it's one of my better ones, but as always I'm left wondering what it would have turned into had I given it an appropriate amount of effort. Then again, I feel that way about all my papers as I never start them on time and make up the difference with a marathon effort at the end. I've long since stopped feeling remorseful about this, my grades at least are good and I've got no serious complaints about the end product. Does leave me wondering what I could accomplish if I was as responsible as I've conned people into thinking, though. Ah screw it, what they don't know won't hurt them.

The gears have been turning in my head for a few weeks now, something's brewing in the hellish nomansland of my subconscious, just waiting for the appropriate combination of alcohol, sleep deprivation and spontaneous musical number to surge into the forefront of my consciousness like Rommel into France in 1940. It's going to be curious to figure out what my occasionally traitorous brain has been cooking up this time. The feeling stated when I was listening to "I Put a Spell On You" by the only good band to come out of the sixties, Creedence Clearwater Revival, so we're likely dealing with a good one here.

I need to get my ass a job. With the end of the school year I have no excuse not to and I need the cash. All necessities of bills and rent aside, there's been a number of things I've been wanting to buy for some time but keep putting off on grounds of relative poverty. Chief among them is a new firearm, specifically a CZ-52 pistol. It's a sweet cold war-era Soviet Bloc weapon made by the Czechs in 7.62x25mm AKA 7.62 Tokarev. I know, I know, not the most powerful round in the world, but they can't all be magnums and as much as I'd like a .357 Ruger they just cost too much at the moment. The cheapest CZ I've found is about a hundred dollars, but since our good buddies at the ATF classify it as a Curio & Relic I'd need a Federal Firearms Licence, class III to have it shipped to me directly. Those run about thirty dollars a year, but the only other alternative is to arrange to have it shipped to a dealer in the area. Who knows how much that'll run me, so I'm considering getting a FFL class III.

Again, though, I need income before that can happen. The last two places I've tried haven't given me any work, which blows as Kaplans would have been alright and the Library Special Collections would have been perfect, but what can you do, other than bitch about it on the internet? If all else fails, I can always temp at an IT firm of some sort, but I'd really, really, want to avoid that as possible. Even at SoverNet call center work had me teetering on the edge of a shooting spree, and I had people there I knew to talk me down. Not that there's anything wrong with a little friendly random shooting spree-action, right? Keep your cathode ray tubes tuned to Big Pat for all the fast breaking news, we'll be right back after these important messages.

Residents of Kansas Will Kindly Ram This Post Up Their Stupid, Creationist Asses

2005-05-06T23:55:00.000-04:00

I try not to get pissed off by imbeciles, truly I do, but every so often something comes up that I just can't stand.
This article has had me steaming mad ever since I saw it a week or so ago. That this is even an issue befuddles me as tapdancing grenade-throwing monkeys never could. You don't believe in evolution, you say? Do you likewise not believe in widespread literacy and the refrigeration of food?

"But Big Pat, evolution is just a theory, not a fact!"

Pardon me while I sneer at your abject retardedness, or don't, at this point I don't really give a flying fuck. Ever hear of the theory of gravitation? It's the mechanism that explains how the FACT of gravity functions, which is yet another aspect of science I expect you mouthbreathing jesus-humping motherfuckers don't comprehend, having only made it through middle school due to the decline of american educational standards. Scientific Theory = the best goddamn explanation we have of any given phenomenom at the present time, subject to change as new evidence becomes available.

That's really beauty of science, it have the internal flexibility to adapt to fit what we know of the world. Not what we believe, not what we want, but what we know. You cockmongering zealots take note, that is why it will eventually kill your archaic, medieval "faith;" science may not know everything, but it surely is the only way anything can be known. In the meantime, I invite you to continue fornicating yourselves with uncomfortable objects while the rest of the world continues on its merry way, and not attempt to saddle us with you obsolete beliefs and utterly arbitrary moral structure. In short, fuck you assholes, fuck you right in your gaping christ-hole.

Take that, Subspace!

2005-04-17T19:29:00.000-04:00

I don't get sick all that often, although I did for a period of my youth. Back around the 7th grade I think it was I spent close to half a semester out sick, severe colds, the flu and the like. I've run temperatures upwards of 106 Fahrenheit a couple of times, which I'm told is close to brain damage levels, and am well acquainted with the sweaty terror of fever dreams. Being sick sucks, being sick for several days in a row is orders of magnitude worse. I have an easy time knowing if I'm coming down with something from all this experience, the tiredness, general unease and vague soreness that herald the oncoming of a truly bad time key me in that the next 24 hours are going to be a merry jaunt into hell. Apparently my immune system emerged from that protracted viral campaign a more robust entity than it had been, like the white blood cell version of how the American Army became the world-ending juggernaut it is these days via it's transformation in the nightmare of Vietnam. Only with slightly fewer tanks.

What I'm drifting around to is that this weekend had been an almost complete write-off due to illness. I started feeling poorly Friday night and when I woke up on Saturday I felt like utter crap. I mark the highlight of my day as managing to get dressed. It wasn't any one thing, that would be too easy to compensate for, it was the usual combination of congestion, slight temperature, muscle aches and general lack of energy that taken together overwhelm both my immune system and the contents of my medicine cabinet, a pathological human wave attack of microscopic North Koreans charging across the DMZ of my health. Sadly, to stretch the analogy even further into the realm of ludicrousness, I had no equivalent Douglas MacArthur or Matthew Ridgeway to lead an immediate counterattack. I spent all day feeling like shit and got to wake up in a sweat as my fever broke, convinced that there were xenomorphs somewhere in the room with me. That'll teach me to watch Aliens when I know I'm likely to hallucinate later.

I had hoped to make some progress on one of my two remaining research projects this weekend, but no. My style of writing papers is a dual affair: if it's say six pages or under I just sit down with whatever relevant notes and books I need and hammer it out. It'll take a few hours at the outside, presuming I'm at all prepared, and then I'll revise it the next day. There's a grey area between six and ten pages where this also can work, but equally often I'll go with the second method, which has been likened by neutral observers* as a terrifying spasm of academic dementia, bordering on nervous breakdown. This takes the better part of, if not the entirety of a day, is fueled by equal parts caffeine and insanity, and usually the last couple pages are full of threatening personal references to the professor in question and unrelated rants about the dangers of international communism. That last part I usually edit out in the revision stage, once I regain consciousness the next day.

Both methods are fairly involved, which just isn't going to happen if I'm feeling like crap, so no work for Big Pat this weekend. Hell, I doubt I could have worked up the energy to yell at the homeless or idly jerk off to Guns and Ammo if I'd wanted to. With that pleasant image hopefully burned into your frontal lobe, I'm outta here for now. Check back next time when our hero complains about something trivial, and then stabs himself in the eye for entirely unrelated reasons.

*The jackasses I hang out with.

A Rainy Night in a City that Knows how to Keep its Secrets

2005-04-02T22:57:00.000-05:00

As probably everyone alive on the planet with access to even the most basic media service is by now aware, Pope John Paul II died today. I'm lousy with converting time zones so I can't quote the exact time, but in Rome I think it was around 9:30 PM. I'd like for this moment to pause and remember the highlights of his life, the glitter his professional kickboxing career brought to Catholicism, how he once singlehandedly fought off an invasions of alien spider-creatures, how he invented the color orange and warned the world of the perils of Elmo years before we all learned the horrible truth, there are truly too many things to adequately document here.

In what passes for all seriousness though, he was an iconic figure. All my catholic friends and the majority of those of other Christian flavors are, to varying degrees, in mourning mode which I, lacking any religious faith or spirituality, don't really identify with. I've got heroes that, when they die, I'll be pretty blue about it, but I comprehend there's an element here that by definition Captain Popetastic did for his faithful beyond simple admiration. I can appreciate his historic contributions though, and look forward to the no holds barred death match the College of Cardinals use to select the new Pope (or so I'm told).

In unrelated news, I caught a showing of Sin City this evening as was blown away. If you like film noir, as I do, it will rock your world. Stylistically it is jaw dropping in its use of black and white with selective coloring and a tribute to Frank Miller's masterpiece comic. Go see it right now, you'll be glad you did.

It's getting on towards crunch time, my term papers are coming due in a couple weeks and, as always they're not as far along as I'd like. What's that they say about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results? As my friend Matt once said, if you wait until the last minute, it'll only take a minute. Maybe one of these days I'll start being more responsible about these things; I'll have to remember to pencil that into my schedule shortly after perfecting faster than light flight and becoming Emperor of the world. This is Big Pat signing off for now, you keep on rocking and I'll keep on rolling.

The Unspeakable Horror of Deferred Roth IRA Contributions

2005-03-27T22:14:00.000-05:00

Put on your goggles and strap yourselves in, it's that time again, time for the thrilling action of income tax! Originally a temporary fund raising expedient during the American Civil War, the twists and turns of our hero pouring over his form 1040 for possible deductions and continuing education credits will keep you guessing until the final scene, where the shocking conclusion will BLOW YOUR MIND.

Yeah, I've finally bit the bullet for this past fiscal year and done my taxes. Forms were hauled out, arthimetic skills brushed off, missing W-2s furtively hunted after until I triumphed over the Internal Revenue Service once more. I look to be entitled to a pretty decent refund this year, for once, due to that continuing education credit I mentioned before. Or I'll be viciously audited, leaving me a broken hulk of a man, scarce able to dress myself, whichever.

Those that know me have remarked on occasion that I've got a fairly remarkable memory. I'll be the first to tell you I do not have photographic recall, not by a long shot, but I do seem to remember a considerable amount more than your average maniac. The story I'm very circuitously getting around to telling is of something I had forgotten, but recently remembered.

You ever have one of those moments when suddenly your remember something completely unrelated to whatever it is your doing at any given moment? I get them from time to time, a lightning bolt of the past lances up out of my long term memory and explodes into my frontal consciousness like a howler monkey strapped to a cruise missile, only with (usually) less screetching and flung feces. For me these moments usually come when I'm doing something inconsequential, like walking to or from class, reading a book that I'm not terribly interested in or debating whether to leap across the subway car and throttle the life from some vapid soccer mom who's yammering away on her cellphone.

All fantasies of premeditated murder aside, the other day I was walking back from class when I remembered a tune I haven't heard in years. It's a terrible electronica thing called Trance Formations by 303 Infinity. Electronica has so many subdivisions that I couldn't tell them apart if I cared, which I don't. I generally don't listen to it anyway because, let's face it, it's overblown soulless crap for glowstick-swingin' raver trash. Kompressor, where are you when we need you? Anyway a friend of mine ran an industrial espionage game about 7 years ago in which I played a l337 h3x0r (gag), with that as his theme song. The GM knew it was terrible, I knew it was terrible, and that made it PERFECT.

It's more that it came back to me all of a sudden from nowhere and stayed firmly in the forefront of my mind all day that struck me. I've had it happen to me before, and once or twice caused it to happen to others by saying or doing something that triggers recall of something they'd forgotten about. Weird how the human brain works that way, maybe that's why the zombies are always trying to eat them.

As if I needed a segue, my friend Chaos has told me he's looking to publish a 'Zine at some point over the coming summer and has asked me to write a couple articles for him. The first is going to be a short biography of that master of eldritch nightmares, H.P. Lovecraft. The second I'm planning to be a series of articles detailing how best to survive the zombie apocalypse. Should be fun, presuming I can swing both and work. Keep it tuned to Big Pat for all the electrifying details!

In Which Our Hero Vents His Spleen

2005-03-19T22:29:00.000-05:00

This is likely going to be a mix of angry and sad, joining together in a whirlwind of frustration, smoldering resentment, and pie.* A death sentence had been handed down on something I love dearly, something that I was a part of for as long as I could be and remained connected to ever since I had to leave it. It is being murdered by those who have covertly wanted it gone for a long time, or at least wanted to rob it of its unique nature and make it a unoffensive parody of itself.

Background time. There was a residental program I lived in during my undergraduate college years at UVM called SciFi, Fantasy and Horror in Liturature. I became a program director my junior year under then Fearless Leader Damiana and declared myself Maximum Warlord the following year upon her graduation. There are too many tales to tell here of SciFi and our many capers, the short version is that I made virtually every friend I have through it and became aware of geek culture and my place in it. I'd kill for all the friends I made there and take a bullet for well over half of them. SciFi saved me from the monster I was in high school and likely would have continued to be. That it is being killed now means that others like myself will not have that stab at finding their place.

I doubt any of those responsible, or those that gave them the excuse they needed to act, will ever read this as they likely don't read blogs, let alone mine. On the off chance they do: You insufferably assholes know who you are, and now should comprehend what an implacable enemy your shortsighted and utterly retarded actions have made in me. For the moment, I invite you to sit on it and spin, you two-faced whores.

This will not be forgotten, nor will it ever be forgiven. I will gleefully relish each and ever personal agony and humiliation you suffer from this point on, and may well endeavor to manufacture some.

*Pie optional.

Alright, rant over. Here's a quiz thingy that cheered me up a little.

Armed and Dangerous
Congratulations! You scored 86%!

You made it out, alive and well supplied. You probably even kept most of your party alive too. You know what to look for, what to take, and when to just run. You even feel a strange inkling to go back. If you did, you'd probably do just fine.

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 95% on survivalpoints

Link: The Zombie Scenario Survivor Test written by ci8db4uok on Ok Cupid

Slip Slidin' Along

2005-01-30T21:58:00.000-05:00

I seriously love the Super Mario franchise (formerly called Super Mario Brothers, until they stopped pretending Luigi was anything other than a meth addicted closet case. It's tragic, really). I've gotten into arguments with friends that the move to 3D platforming ruined things, but I love both Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine. Granted, the camera angles sucks ass at times, but it's just so much fun to run that tubby Italian plumber all over the place and jump on shit. You want lighthearded, genuinely fun platform gaming, go to Mario, and Nintendo didn't pay me a dime to say that.

In other news, it's really slippery outside. The parking lot's lousy with black ice and I nearly fell down several times getting my laundry. If there had been a penguin present I would have raced him, but there wasn't so I just stumbled about like an idiot. Find out what inanities our hero reveals next time, on Big Pat!

Return to the Seattle Cell

2004-12-15T01:18:00.000-05:00

Please Wear Pants in the National Archives

2004-11-15T22:58:00.000-05:00

History can be a harsh mistress at times, mainly when you've got three term papers due in a few weeks, have made little progress on any of them and the longest and most important of which needs some primary source research done pronto. With this hanging over my head I dragged myself out of bed not only in the morning for once but fairly early in it, hopped the metro out to College Park and trudged into the National Archives there. Registration took about five minutes, with a nifty new ID for my already card-filled wallet. The photo reminds me that I ought be more serious with the exercise. Not liking your own face can be a powerful motivator, no matter what any simpering wellness advocate my say. Screw you "love your looks no matter how grotesque you are" butt trumpets, I'm accentuating the negative and loving it.

Anyway.

That unrelated revelation aside, the Archives are dauntingly dense and impenetrable. I spent the better part of an hour finding out no one knew where the ARC (finding aid software) tutorial was, or if it existed in the first place. Maybe relying on FRUS volumes and Congressional Records will be enough. I'm certain this isn't denial talking, really.

If you're at all serious about historical research, archival work is time that must be put in at one point or another, but I'm hoping I don't need to do that much more. A wee bit too much effort for too little payoff so far; this may end up being a contributing feature in not going beyond the Masters level of graduate study. Or not, what the hell do I know anyway.

Argh, time to leapt reluctantly back into the books, hopefully to dredge something approaching knowledge from them before the animatronic Jaws of tedium and exhaustion claim me. We'll be right back, after these important messages.

Stop Whining

2004-11-03T22:09:00.000-05:00

Alright, I've been patient and understanding as all hell with you idiots, but dammitall you've pushed me past the point of tolerance. I've not said word one about the presidential elections, the varied merits and flaws of this candidate or that, but the utter childishness some of you fuckwits have shown in dealing with the campaigns and the election results has finally gotten me pissed off. Congratulations, jackass.

Let's get a few things straight here: four more years of Bush is not going to kill the country. Yes, he's less than desirable as chief executive, I voted against him too, but for christ's sake here it's not like he's been appointed God-Emperor for life and anyone that even suggests that this election is heading America in that direction desperately needs to get their head dislodged from their rectum. Heronblue, I'm looking in your direction here. Repeat after me, we've had shitty presidents before. We will have shitty presidents again. We've even had shitty presidents who have attempted to restrict and revoke civil liberties on a scale which Bush could only dream of. This is not some new, unprecedented tragedy, you are not watching Rome burn, dumbasses.

Supreme Court shifting rightwards? What the hell else is new? In time it will shift back towards center and even leftwards at some point or another. That's the goddamn cuntkicking genius of American democracy, it's got more flex and give built into it than I can shake a stick at, if you Grade A dillholes would stop screaming about how the opposition was the living incarnation of Evil you'd see it too and calm the fuck down.

The Iraq war a giant mistake? I agree entirely.

The Sept. 11th attack being misused to advance poorly thought out foreign policy? I'm with you there.

The Patriot Act right up there with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee? No fucking kidding.

Gay Marriage most likely going to be unfairly and likely unconstitutionally restricted? Pisses me off too.

However, you're sure as fuck not going to change any of this by screaming about how only idiots and halfwits voted for Bush. He may not have won properly last time, but this time he actually did get the popular vote as well as the required electoral votes. Guess what, shitstains, he actually appealed to a larger number of Americans than Kerry did. I'm not happy about it, but I'm not going to go on some retarded liberal diatribe about how this indicates that everyone who doesn't agree with my politics is an unthinking reactionary. The elitism and condescension you douchebags have shown disgusts me and insures that, presuming the Republicans field a reasonable candidate next time around, I'm back voting conservatively as I always have.

Get the fuck over yourselves and stop whining about how you're going to leave the country like some pampered Hollywood crybaby who's not had a single real hard day in their life. Oh no, I didn't get my way so I'm going to throw a tantrum and leave! Jesus, you people make me sick.

Anatomy of a Road Trip

2004-10-18T23:34:00.000-04:00

The road trip is a fundamental part of the American psyche, much like freedom of speech, Fourth of July firework fatalities and occasionally getting really pissed off and invading some other country. It is a tradition, and like most traditions it's rooted in abject stupidity taken to its most glorious extreme.

Whether jaunting a couple hours to visit friends on impulse, sojourning across the state to urinate in someone's mail box or blasting across the alkali flats in a jet powered, monkey navigated rocket car, any road trip worthy of the name includes a set of basic components:

1) A Vehicle of Some Kind - This can be car, truck, motorcycle, fusion-powered deathwagon, whatever, as long as it's got wheels and tears up the highway. The more gratuitously overqualified (read: fast) for conveying your ass from Point A (origin) to Point B (destination, with sidejaunts to C (pitstops), D (impulse stops, ie: large pit of poisonous snakes in Delaware) and E(getting lost and possibly shivved, ending up in South Jersey, etc), the better. I'm not telling you to steal a muscle car Mad Max would be proud to haul ass around post-apocalyptic Australia in, but I'm not tell you not to either.

2) Tunes - Music is only slightly less important than the car itself, and can make or break a roadtrip. Depending entirely on radiostations is a huge crapshoot, even if you know the stations on your projected route. Things can get really shitty really quickly if things go all pop or country/western on you for any length of time greater than three seconds, and if you've invited along any of the drooling panfried go-tards that enjoy such aural feces I recommend plowing head on into the next telephone pole you come across at max speed. Anyway, bring CDs or tapes, depending on what your rig is...errr...rigged for. Plenty of metal, grunge and classic rock is most appropriate here, as is anything else that induces you to put the hammer down. Remember my recommendations about pop and country and you're all set on this front.

3) Friends, Cronies, Other Assorted Idiots - A road trip can be done alone, but it sucks ass compared to having pals along to magnify the fun and collective imbecility of things. Ideally you want one fewer companion than you car has seats, unless one of them is massively overweight, in which case have two spare seats and watch your cornering. Do be careful about overdoing the stupid element here. You're looking for pals who can keep you entertained, tell interesting stories, sing along badly to the tunes and read a map at least moderately well, not someone who's going to grab the wheel at random intervals, shit himself while trying to fart or stick him dick in the cigarette lighter while shrieking "I'M A TOASTER OVEN! CALL NOW FOR BIG, BIG SAVINGS!" It's not a good scene, take it from me.

4) Tasty Provisions - The car's going to need fuel and so do you. Opinion is divided on whether it's better to load up before heading out and thus never have to stop except for bathroom breaks (and the truly hardcore skip even this) versus at least stopping for drivethrough grub, which is generally at least a few degrees above room temperature. I go back and forth, depending on whether I'm planning a Type B trip (enjoyment trumps efficiency, stop as often as needed to have a good time on the open road) or a Type A (Blues Brother climactic chase sequence level of urgency). Drinks are a delicate matter as well. You, debatably responsible driver that you are, can't so much as touch booze. Yeah, I know you think you can handle it, big shooter, but we're already breaking enough laws here and this one may well turn a delightful stupidity-filled trip into negligent homicide-flavored tragedy. That's not to say the morons in back might not have a wee nip off the bottle, but you sure a fuck can't. That leaves you with soda, water, juice, milk, etc. The big issue here is needing to piss, which is going to come up at least once during the trip. Sugar and caffience are diuretic, kids, so the more Mt. Dew you slam in a futile attempt to emulate your X-Treme sports heroes the more you'll need to drain the lizard. And thanks for making me use "X-Treme" in a sentence, you shithead. If you're not bothered by having to stop or don't mind pissing in empty McDonalds cups (or out the window, if you're some sort of Stretch Armstrong mutant freak), suck down as much sugary junk as you like. This also has the side effect of increased vibrations and stopping time, so go nuts and don't worry about the longterm nerve damage, they're doing remarkable things with helper animals these days.

5) A Map - Sure, you know where you're going. You've done it a million times before and anyway you heard from this one guy that as long as you take a sharp left after the burned out Denny's you'll get there no problem. Let's be honest here, no matter how good your directions you're going to get lost at least once. When it happens having a map and the glib ability to lie about it afterwards are both vitally important. Getting lost is much less fun if you can't find you way back to the route and have to actually ask for direction. Man, I get the shivers just thinking about it.

Alright we've got the basics down. Once out on the road be sure to sing along with the music, tell tasteless jokes of dubious humor, browbeat someone into hanging their fat white ass out the window while passing a schoolbus, accuse a popular celebrity of being gay at least once, scream, get lost, panic, kill a drifter, run from the cops and in all other ways have a good time. The key thing to remember is, "If we survive, it'll make a great story afterwards." And if it ends up being a boring time, embellishment and barefaced prevarication can fill in the blanks anyway.

Keep it Hot and Keep it Coming

2004-10-05T23:13:00.000-04:00

Man, that really sounds like the title of a porno now that I think about it, with actor's names like Candi Shack and Buck Hardly and whatnot. Good thing I trimmed it from the first version which was "Keeping hot, black and coming," then I'd be unable to avoid making this entire post some sort of freakish Dr. Who erotic fanfic or something. I think we can all agree that's better off avoided.

What I was trying to allude to coffee, which isn't even that arousing unless you're some sort of java fetishist, in which case I'd kindly ask you to leave. This is the internet, there's much better things to jerk off to than the debatably coherent rants that pour from my diseased mind. Trust me on that one.

Today the history grad association had what they entitled a caffeine break in the roomy closet allotted to us as a lounge/cafe/auxiliary corpse storage. This is a student association that, as a history grad at GWU I'm a member by default. I don't know the people that run it all that well yet but they seem like pretty stand up figures and find me sufficiently non-loathsome to laugh at my wisecracks.

I drink coffee every once in a while, usually only if 1)it's early, 2)it's cold and 3)I'm tired/strung out/hung over. Generally I like my caffeine chilled, preferrably in cola or Mt. Dew format, but a cup of joe can hit the spot sometimes* and hey, it was free. As we all know, free tastes good.

I took a cup black, with a single sugar cube, and time was wasted as other history students wandered in, shared in the erstatz bounty. I had another two or three cups. Nick complained about all the papers he's had to grade, and how many more remain. Dance, PhD monkey, dance. Another cup or two of the black stuff go down, I get complimented on the shirt I'm wearing, which arrived completely randomly in the mail a few months ago, with no return address or any indictation of who sent it to me or why (backtracing it through EBay turned up a friend with a liking for bizarre jokes with no punchline).

4PM rolls around and I finally decided that I've wasted too much time and that it's time to hit the books I've been avoiding. Besides, everyone's speaking too slowly, the room is vibrating for some reason and I desperately need to piss. Actually, the whole building seems to be shaking for some reason and I could see through time.

This is another reason I don't drink coffee much, I tend to lose track of intake and things get right out of hand. Soda I have to work to get that wired, but with coffee it just seems to occur; apparently the almightly java gods either love or hate me, take your pick.

The rest of the day has been spent winding down while reading about, variously, feudalism, the Bomb, and the evolution of the prison in France; the majority could teach toasted whitebread lessons in dryness. Next semester they better have some good military history courses available, I'm not sure how much more of this social/cultural crap I can take.

*This is necessary: I hate coffee enthusiasts, those that infest coffee shops with copies of Pushkin they don't understand and a general attitude of style over substance. I am driven straight up the proverbial wall by the pseudo-sophistication of their selection of what form of foamy over-cinnimoned jug o' crap their going to sip on while attempting desperately to look contemplative and not like they've just shit themselves. It's almost as if Trend had somehow become literally liquid and consumable and all the monied idiots in the world were flocking for a steamin' hot mug of popularity. This and inexplicable size conventions alone have made Starbucks more money than I can ever dream of in a lifetime of freelance history.

Lens Cap

2004-09-26T21:40:00.000-04:00

One of the best movies ever came out this past week, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It's got drama! Action! Snappy one-liners! Action! Giant 30's death robot things! Action! Hell, it's got so much action it needs an Action image macro!

Seriously, go see it right now.

The Play is the Tragedy, "Man", and its Hero the Conqueror Worm

2004-09-22T02:12:00.000-04:00

The title to tonight's entry comes from Edgar Allen Poe, as the more literate among you have no doubt already noticed. This past weekend was the penultimate session of the Freedom and Unity live action roleplaying game. We traditionally run a vampire game but this year, being the final one, the floodgates were cast open to all within White Wolf's World of Darkness. They're ending their game lines, the contiguous gaming staff is ending its annual running of the game, it just synchs together so nicely. Friday was the end of the Vampire and Werewolf storylines we ran; being the Vampire storyteller for the season I made the trip up to VT to attend.

Freedom and Unity has been running every summer since 1998, roughly. This has been the second time I've been a storyteller rather than a player, which I honestly prefer in most circumstances. It's just is more fun to be down in it, surviving night to night on your wits alone in my opinion. Tom Chorleton, who has many years ago now burned out entirely on gaming due, in large part, to several false friends screwing him over hardcore, was the first storyteller of Freedom and Unity. Those of us who were there in the beginning, by this time a minority, still miss his involvement. Since then it's been mostly run by Brent and Pathin, with assistence from many and sundry, myself included. It's a bit sobering that it's ending, a passing of an era in Vermont gaming if I can flatter those of us involved for just a moment.

It was time to end it, but I'm already missing the fun I've had. Thanks to all those who gamed with me in Freedom and Unity, the vast majority was a blast. This is Big Pat, and his many different LARP personas, signing off.

...Get Five Minutes of Sleep, Then I'm Up Again, Fresh as a Daisy

2004-09-15T01:01:00.000-04:00

I've been looking forward to going back to school for a while now. I loved college, it was a vindication of all my nerdish obsessions and, after spending a disastrous year as a Chemistry major, not at all that taxing once I moved to history. I've been back in working on an MA for about a week and a half now and my reflection is curling his lip in that mocking fashion he always does when he's about to lay into me.

"Four courses? Sure, I can handle the work load, golly, I did more than that as an undergraduate," He mocks.

I tell him I was always holding in reserve the possibility of dropping a class if things got to hairy.

"Oh, that'd be just great, except you're still reading the equivalent of three books a week, if not more, as well as writing weekly response papers and perparing three massive term papers by the end of the semester."

I tell him I can handle it.

"Bull-fucking-shit you can! Don't forget you've also got to worry about the foreign language requirement, nicht wahr? Dein Deutsch ist nicht gut, vergesst?"

I tell him to shut up, I can handle it.

"Let's not forget the comps at some point either, even though you're terrifyingly uncertain as to what they actually entail. Oh yeah, and you thesis, which by the way you haven't a clue on yet-"

I tell him to shut the fuck up or I'm drinking bleach again and it's curtains for the both of us. He obliges.

Seriously, things are getting into the swing of things down here and I'm already struggling not to be overwhelmed. This is more work than I had anticipated, but the above comedia aside I'm still head above water. For the moment, at least.

Although I'm sure you're all keenly interested in both my academic career and screaming matches with my lack of self-confidence, I'm going to now move to a decision I made recently that, frankly, surprises me as much as it probably will you: I've been going to the gym every day for just under a week now.

When I left home to go to college I stood a six feet and somewhere between one and two inches, depending on my shoes and ego on any given day, and weighed in at a massive 140 lbs. It was generally true that I kept 50 cents in my pocket to keep from blowing away in the breeze, which invariably happened anyway as I'd spend the 50 cents on soda. I walked just about everywhere, so despite not having any real physical exercise to speak of I was fairly active. Of more importance my metabolism was a literal furnace, consuming all I dumped into it and turning it into enough waste heat that I stood out on NSA thermal imaging recon photos (long story). Upon graduation I'd grown to 160 lbs, which still kept me within the range of tall n' scrawny, which is how I've always been and how I like.

Then I spent a couple years working a mostly sedentary tech support job at SoverNet (your Sovereign Vermont Internet Service Provider) and one day looking in the mirror I almost almost looked jowly. No longer could I count my ribs through a tshirt, if anything I'd begun to develop a gut. The scale, merciless scourge of the insecure, declared my weight to be over 180, heading towards 190.

Let's be honest here, 180 lbs is not unreasonable for someone of my height. A bit on larger side, but still decent enough. If I wanted to slide into ruin it would be a great place to start. The thing is a large part of my identity involves being a scrawny geek, so I've resolved to start exercising again and try to drop the weight like a Tijuana crack whore. No, thank you, Jimmy Tango.

So it's been half an hour each day sweating and lifting heavy objects certain requisite distances to work various muscle groups. I can't say I enjoy the effort, smell or commitment of time, but it should get me down to what I want to weigh eventually and there are a lot of hot chicks wearing very little there fretting over smaller weight differentials than I'm admittedly only mildly concerned about. Man I love that particular double standard.

Once Upon a Time in Hell

2004-09-12T22:36:00.000-04:00

A somber note to begin with: A couple of my friends have made and are continuing to make very bad choices in matters of personal comportment and long-term decisions. In fact, they're acting like a couple of complete retards, to be perfectly frank. The specifics are not important, or rather they're only important to those who already know what they are, so I leave them out. One has been disappointing me for a bit, the other is a surprise, I had thought more of him. Enough of that for now, I'll expand more later if I need to.

I had promised a dissertation on hobos a couple posts ago, so here we go. Strictly speaking, the term hobo is traditionally applied to that type of itinerant that rides the rails, hitching from one city to the next in boxcars along the great freight lines of American. He is usually to be found around a trash- or oilcan fire in railyards late at night after the company bulls have departed for the night, stovepipe hat with the top blown out at a jaunty angle, eating beans from a can. However, the term hobo is more generally applicable to any and all homeless types, including bums, vagrants, drifters and associated lowlives. It is in this context that I regard the hobo, as both American rail traffic has fallen on hard times since the Depression and coming of the Interstate highway system, and also it allows my diseased mind a greater range of targets.

The North American Hobo, Vagrantis Americanis, can be broadly separated into two major species, the Singin' Hobo (Vagrantis Americanis Caneris) and the Stabbin' Hobo (Vagrantis Americanis Foderis). As the name implies, the former is a cheery, laughaday fellow, ready with a pleasant if not remotely coherent tune about how the old gray mare, apparently, ain't like she used to be; the latter has nothing to offer other than a rusty shiv to the abdomen, and should accordingly be avoided at all costs.

The Singin' Hobo is generally found capering around a jar/cup/hat/etc into which they entice people to deposit spare change and/or bodily fluids. If one offers to piss in your hand for a dollar it is advised you decline and possibly run. Involuntary exchange of urine aside, the Singin' Hobo is the most benign degenerate you're likely to meet. He/She can even be entertaining, as long as one stands far enough away to keep flecks of salivia off one's lapels. The best Singin' Hobos out there are deserving of whatever spare change you've got. Just don't let them touch you.

The Stabbin' Hobo lies on the other end of the vagrant spectrum. They often camoflage themselves with the change cup of the Singin' Hobo and lie in wait, much as the the smelly, unwashed and deranged spider for the fly. As soon as you pass by without dropping, say, the net domestic product of Sweden in their cup, BAM, they ram a shank in your lower intestines. No fun, let me tell you.

It had been theorised by many respected experts in the field, possibly crocked out of their gourd on bootleg hootch, that in between these two extemes of hobodom lies the Screamin' Hobo. The Screamin' Hobo has not yet taken up the violent ways of the Stabbin' Hobo but has divested himself of the genial good nature of the Singin' Hobo without sacrificing his inarticulate nature. The Screamin' Hobo will harrange you for not giving him your spare change, or not giving him enough of your spare change, or for being part of the conspiracy that sterilized him and a hundred other good men in the 70's, or for stealing his air, or existing in the first place. If none of these reasons hold true, rest assured that the the Screamin' Hobo will find something else to scream at you about. My best advise is to run as fast as humanly possible.

So that's hobos in a nutshell. Other than the Stabbin' variety, which are thankfully in the minority, you don't really have all that much to worry about. At worst you'll have ten wasted minutes or a vomited-upon piece of clothing to have dry cleaned, and that's really not all that bad.

This Should Surprise No One

2004-09-09T01:56:00.000-04:00

You are Megatron. You don't know the meaning of the
word compassion. You would stab your own mother
if she so much as looked at you in a way you
didn't like. Death, destruction, and domination
are your jobs and your hobbies are probably
worse. On a plus side, no one can find a weak
circuit in your mainframe. Rock on with your
obsessively evil self.

Transformers Generation One Personality Test
brought to you by

Maple Syrup, Roast Pig and Scotch

2004-09-06T22:10:00.000-04:00

My weekends tend not to follow any particular set course or routine, sometimes I plan something, sometimes I just wing it and see what happens. This weekend was a combination of both, as there was the wedding/civil union deal on Saturday and nothing other than travelling on Friday preceeding it. I flew into Manchester airport in NH and was there greeted by my pal the Magic Man. Wish he had a web presence so I could link you over but sadly he's a wee bit behind the times when "teh Intarweb" is concerned. He, along with Pathin, were two of a pathetically small group of rejects, outcasts and weirdos that, among other things, were my only real friends in grade and high school and kept me from shooting up the place. I was the angry, sullen geek evereyone hated and he was the go to guy, the maker of deals and taker of improbable roadtrips that, surprisingly, didn't end up with a dead hooker in the trunk. Short version, he's a pal with a larger than life reputation and past, many are surprised he's still alive.

Anyway he picked me up from the airport around 11 or so in the morning, at which point I was still questioning the wisdom of that early a flight (anything before noon = too early to consider in most circumstances) a lunch of bacon cheeseburgers and beer was obtained in Concord, a few beers more at the Elks club in Plymouth (he's a member, I'm not) despite the dive-level of quality. We reached Lyndon and got a pizza, then settled in for a solid night of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and scotch. In all likelyhood, this might not have been the brightest decision to make with a wedding to go to the next day but I never claimed to be the smartest man alive. Alright, I have claimed to be the smartest man alive but then again I lie a lot and consistency is truly the hobgoblin of small minds.

Despite a lot of road work in route 7 on the way we got to the wedding with plenty of time to spare. Those of you with a theatric background may feel free to sing Get Me to the Church on Time at this point. The ceremony was nice enough, although there was too much Jesus in it for my tastes.* It struck me as though the priest was trying to make the ceremony about just how darn wonderful his imaginary friend in the sky was and, oh yeah, a couple of people were joinng there lives together as well, just as a footnote. What the hell, it was there ceremony and if they liked it I'm not going to make a big deal some guy in a robe and collar invoking mythology.

After that came the pig, oh lord, the pig! I am a big fan of pork, and ham, and shoulder meat and, well, almost everything edible on a pig (knuckles, snouts and rinds being the exceptions). Combined with corn on the cob, free beer and friends I've not seen since moving down here to DC and it was pure heaven and a pack of smokes. They also had little bottles of maple syrup as favors, so I snatched a few. Now I'm going to need some pancakes or other excuse to eat it.

At any rate, it's all done now and I'm back in Washington. Have been working on a book on Wilsonianism for class, it's been a reminder of how good intentions count for precisely dick in international relations and idealism can royally fuck everything up. Always been a big fan of the pragmatic realist who's willing to compromise to get things done. Also, apparently Robert McNamara has continued the career of being a shortsight, self-serving arrogant dickhead that he began as SecDef during the Vietnam years. Wiz-kids my goddamn ass.

Class tomorrow is my sole 11 o'clocker of the week, so sleep looms ever closer. Join us for our next exciting episode where the protagonist expands on differing species of hobos and possibly gets shivved.

*Too much Jesus: a sliding scale where any quantity of Jesus is defined as too much. Indicative of author's resentment of and distaste for religious belief and faith, organized or not.

This is Not My Umbrella

2004-08-30T23:45:00.000-04:00

My pal 6a0209 is back from England, having spent a school year and change across the pond. He flew into Virginia and stopped by my place on his way back to the frozen north for the evening, we stopped by a Japanese place not too far from where I live for some grub and then got down to serious business; I speak of couse of drunken mario kart action. Sadly I lack a gamecube so we had to settle for the N64 version, but is was satisfactory. For him the weather is appallingly hot and humid, apparently I've started to become acclimated to such things as I didn't see today as being any worse than any other. Having central AC has allowed me to adapt quicker than otherwise, I guess.

Earlier Johnogue joined me for lunch downtown, was good to see another regular even thought it's only been a couple weeks. Things remain much as they have been back at home, which is good to hear. Much like Garth I fear change, dated reference though that may be.

This weekend a couple of friends of mind are marrying, or the closest thing to it as circumstance dictates. The sole reason for my qualification of that last sentence is gender based; they're both female. Civil union, you bet pal. They're my friends and they're in love with each other and goddammit that's e-fucking-nough for me, thank you very much. One of the many advantage to denying and defying the existence of god is the ability to dictate one's own moral imperatives and in this case it allows me to celebrate two of my friends coming together, hopefully, for a lifetime. Still need to buy them a gift, come to think about it.

That's enough for now, stay tuned for more wacky and occasionally insightful commentary, here on the Big Pat channel!

What's Red, Sticky, and Not a Gunshot Wound?

2004-08-25T21:37:00.000-04:00

Let's get a few things straight before going any further, I love to eat. I mean I really love to eat. In my opinion eating is probably the second most purely enjoyable thing you can do with your time. And in eating, there is little that comes close to good BBQ. I was wandering around this afternoon, still getting my bearing on Roslyn, and came across a place called Red Hot and Blue and they've got some damn fine ribs there. Not the best I've ever had, but right up there. They had a choice between wet and dry rub ribs, and although tempted I went with wet. Ribs needs sauce in my opinion. I've been told a good dry rub is superior but as hungry as I was I wasn't going to gamble on the unknown. I've always found the sauce makes the meat. The pulled pork was pretty tempting as well, but it will have to wait for next time.

The Smithsonian Museum of American History has a new set of exhibits on the Industrial Revolution, which had me as happy as a disturbingly unsettled kid in a candy store. Seeing all that steampunk technology had me wanting to put on a top hat and oppress the working class. It was a curiosity to see the various factory and mill rules placards, all of which mandated at least a ten hour working days with work six day a week. As much as I consider trade unions to be unnecessary relics, this was the force that caused them to come into existence and, at that time, did do much good. Pity they're lazy, shiftless drains on the economy these days.

Still adjusting to life down here, more when I manage something interesting or injure myself in an entertaining way, like falling off of a building onto a clown.

Getting There is Half the Fun

2004-08-22T21:02:00.000-04:00

This past Thursday, bright and early, my parents and I loaded up the truck, trailer, and my car for the big move from Burlington to DC. After getting underway and three minutes onto the highway, the foldout pad they'd brought along to sleep on pulled free, whipped out into the slipstream and smacked into my grill before I could swerve away. Things went downhill from there.

The weather was hot and my AC's been dead for over a year now, so by the time we staggered into the parking lot of my new place down here I was half dead from the heat and humidity. Having gotten the keys and let myself in, I then promptly stumbled on the concrete steps leading to my door and skinned my knee and a knuckle on my left hand. Moving thus became a delicate ballet of trying to keep my exhausted and resentful limbs moving in the right direction, my mind from shutting down entirely and thus going into automatic mode* and my blood from staining everything vermilion. Also the carpet cleaner hadn't yet gotten around to steam cleaning my carpet so even after dragging things in nothing could be setup.

But hey, why gripe on obstacles overcome when I can instead ramble on about other, equally pointless matters? Spent most of the day wandering around Rosyln, the...well I'm not sure exactly what officially is, but it's the part of Arlington I'm in and it's ridiculously close to GWU, where I start work on my master's on the 1st. First a graduate degree in Euro-American Imperialism, then the world! Or something.

While obtaining groceries earlier I was looking over the beer rack for something to, hopefully, both dull the constantly screaming voices in my head and also shorten my worthless life. To my surprise and masochistic delight, I found that the store in question carried both 40s and six-packs of Schiltz malt liquor. Now I've drank a lot of really bad booze in my time, speaking both to different types of rotgut hootch and quantity thereof, and, as any degenerate will tell you, a special corner in hell is reserved for whomever came up with the recipe for Schlitz. It's sort of similar to sipping diluted kerosene cut with embalming fluid and regret, then being punched in the face for a while by a second rate ex-heavy weight boxer with anger control problems (read: all of them). Yet, somehow, when the experience is over and I remember who I am and how to think again, I find myself reaching for another. It's terrible and wonderful at the same time, sort of like a slimjim, you can't stand the texture or flavor or grease content, but when it's gone you want another. And then to die, usually.

Needless to say I grabbed a sixpack. The cashier seemed a bit confused as to why I was giggling under my breath as paid for it and my other, legitimate, purchases, but I figured it wouldn't be worth the time and vagrancy arrest to explain the matter.

*Flip out, scream a lot, set fire to things, etc. Not a generally good state of mind to be in.

Real Estate, Kidnapping and Extortion

2004-08-17T21:48:00.000-04:00

My car was in the shop today and as such I was limited in mobility to my occasionally treasonous legs and increasingly inadequate footwear. Despite three years fine service to this point, my Nike's are just about worn to the point of leather slippers; the tread's worn smooth and even with the inclusion of insoles they provide only slightly more cushion than armor plate.

Regardless of my lack of instep support I had to venture out into the world to pursue change of address forms, bank deposits and any general weirdness Burlington was willing to throw at me as I trolled around the eastern end of Main St. and Dorset St. Luck was on hand and I managed to avoid getting flattened by any oncoming eighteen wheelers (see previous mention of my duplicitous lower limbs). On the way back I walked past a 20th Century Jack Associates office, a local branch of 20th Century Real Estate. Out front they maintain a sign that comes perilously close to violating Vermont's anti-billboard laws, on which they proclaims "Our Associates are Highly Motivated to Sell Your Home." Pausing to think rationally, this surely only indicates that they're probably on some manner of incentive program to motivate them.

However, the first thing that came to mind was the idea of each and every associate having a friend, family member or beloved pet held at gunpoint somewhere, doomed to a 9mm short through the brainpan should said associate fail to make their sales quota for the month. Amnesty International has been contacted but they stopped taking my calls after I mailed them the fifth finger, so I think we're powerless to stop 20th Century Real Estates' continuing terrorizing of their employees. Thankfully the worse consequences of poor performance in the realm of freelance history is a restrictive diet of ramen, tap water and rotgut vodka, not necessarily consumed in that order.

Other consequences of the day are that my teeth are now clean, I'm immune to meningitis and my car is back in functioning shape. I'd call it a curious juxtaposition of events, except it isn't and was mostly just an excuse to use the word "juxtaposition." Man, that's such a great word to use in sentences, right up there with "erudite" and "the money by twelve or the girl dies!" That last one might be more of a phrase than word, now that I think on it.

One more day until the DC move, been thinking about calling the whole deal the Great DC Caper, mostly because I also really like the word caper. Brings to minds vaudvillian theiving bufoonery and, more recently, muppets, which I also approve of. 14 years, roughly, since Jim Henson died, and I still can't get enough of those wacky puppty things. I've participated in a Great Boston Caper, but that was just getting down and back with my car staying in one piece, thus impressing the girl, thus earning me all manners of spontaneously offered carnal delights (they claim two out of three ain't bad, they are unbelievably wrong). We all do stupid things, I just do them consciously and without regard for my own health or safety laws in whatever state I'm careening through, most likely on fire. I'm being entertainingly moronic for free and passing the savings on to you!

I place a lot of stock in being clever and sneaky, and as such have been contemplating an appropriate farewell to bestow/inflict on my friends. Unfortunately at the moment I've got nothing more of note than burning down their various houses and domiciles, and it strikes me that they might take that the wrong way for some reason. So it's a dead project with only a little time left to run before it's patently impossible anyway.

Tomorrow brings packing, cashing out my local bank account and haggling with the property manager in DC about having a key ready for me when I get down there. Stress, it's what's for dinner. For the moment, however, I've got the History Channel on TV, a glass of bourbon on hand with ice and Pink Floyd describing The Great Gig in the Sky through some caterwauling woman and wonderful piano work. Live for the moment and all that.

Next Episode: Our fearless hero sceams a lot and possibly gets killed in a freak zepplin accident, don't go away!

You'll Love the Punchline

2004-08-16T02:58:00.000-04:00

I'd prefer to avoid this, but as none of you have any idea why I'm doing this a paragraph or two of exposition is probably in order. I have always purported to harbor a dislike for blogs, livejournals and the like bordering on psychosis, holding they were mainly for attention whores and pan-fried internet retards; like just about everything else I do this was mostly bluff, setup for the punchline to come.

The secret which kept me giggling to myself at night was that I was running one under an assumed identity, thus pulling a fast one on my friends many of whom maintain livejournals or blogs. The idea was that I would reveal to them I was this new person they'd been interacting with and have share a laugh at the absurdity of internet anonymity. Unfortunately Chaos tumbled to the secret way earlier than I had hoped and I had to cut him in on the whole deal, which led me to writing myself into a position I didn't particularly like. I ended up dropping it, but before then I started this deal. The old joke was to see if I could get away with it while still talking to my friends constantly in my alternate persona, without lying or anything, and it proved more than I could do without devoting more time to it that I wanted to. This one exists simply to see how long I can get away with it, being open and using proper names and suchlike. Sooner or later a google search or something'll probably nail me, but let's just see how long it takes.

There is, I'm forced to admit, at least one legitimate reason for this format to exist, that of keeping up with friends and associates who are physically distant; this was initially pointed out to me by Johnoghue, another pal who maintains a livejournal I've made fun of previously. Despite the fun I have at his expense, he's a stand-up guy and maker of these occasionally insightful points. I've not previously needed to do so, however, as I have lived in close proximity to anyone I'd like to keep up to date on my action and adventure-filled life.

There's also that I just like writing and being clever and amusing; it's relaxing and I get a kick out of doing it. And sometimes I manage to be generally entertaining, so stick around and see what sort of antics I get up to. Enough explanation, on with the show.

This was supposed to be a vacation week for me, time off between quitting my job and moving down to DC for graduate school. Very little has been, unfortunately, as my two roommates have been moving out of the condo we rent as well and both are critically lack the ability to demonstrate adaptability when things change for any reason, even though they're only moving across town rather than ten hours down the eastern seaboard as I'm doing. As such, it's been a maddening week of delays, procrastination and prevarication and, as Lincoln put in referring to General McClellan's inability to come to grips with the numerically weaker Confederate army, "don't want to do." Thankfully it's all done now, work that should have taken but a day or two at most to complete.

The place is, finally, clean and empty of all but my things, most of which are packed and ready to go when I depart next week. A younger, angier James Hetfield than you can find these days belts his fury at me and a glass of much deserved Jack Daniels on the rocks sits at hand, things are looking up.

Ever since I announced to my friends that I'd gotten into GWU and was leaving for DC in mid-August I've periodically had to face the "excited about moving?" question that seems to come up in most every conversation I've had since. When I left Lyndon to attend UVM for my undergraduate work I had the same thing, albeit from less people, and at the time I generally answered with either a shrug or other noncommittal noise/gesture. This was partially as I was a rude jerk at the time and didn't like talking to people except to insult them. More than that though, I lacked anything besides family and friends I could count on one hand (all of whom, however, I'd gladly kill for and some of whom I'd consider taking a bullet for) to really tie me to that wretched backwater filthhole.

This, however, is different. I've been in Burlington for six years now and I've loved it here. I've, somehow, managed to make a bunch of friends and generally just enjoy the hell out of the place, and now I'm leaving. Truth be told, I'm going to miss it here, which is something I could never say about the town I was born and grew up in. Those who know me have questioned the wisdom of moving to the nation's capital, what with my incipient megalomania, general ability to be the strangest person in any given room, and obsession with firearms, but I think it will be good to take a hiatus from Burlington, to see if absence does truly make the heart grow fonder.

Insects are somehow making it through my window screens, tiny blackflies inching through, attracted to the light of the monitor. Man I wish I had AC in this place, would limit my interaction with nature all the more. We'll be right back after our author collapses after a period of no less than eight hours, stay tuned for more wacky hijinks.