Category: Hobbies & Interests

Other things that interest me besides the “big ticket items”

The Veteran

Last night kicked off this year’s ultimate frisbee season. The theme for this year’s teams is 80s video games, with the usual “ultimatizing” of the names. So my team is Dumpy Kong (this is the second time I’ve been on a team with the word “Kong” in it; back in our “12 Monkeys” season I was on King Kong). Other teams are Clogger, Stack-Man and Hammeroids.

When our team got together the manager had us go around the circle and state our names, and how long we’d been playing ultimate and how long we’d been in SBUL. I knew this was going to make me uncomfortable, as we went around and people said they’d been playing ultimate for a year, or three years, or six or seven years. And then we got to me.

“I’m Michael, and I’ve been playing ultimate off-and-on since high school.

Which was twenty years ago.

This does not mean that I have 20 years worth of skills.

Oh, and this is my tenth year in SBUL.”

I feel like a fraud when I say it, because I’m maybe an average player in SBUL (which is not a “high skills” league), but I really was playing ultimate over lunch in high school back in 1985/86.

Afterwards I was throwing with two women on the team, and we had an exchange something like this:

Woman One: “When you said you’d been playing since high school, I thought, ‘Did they have ultimate back in the 80s?'”

Woman Two: “He probably invented it.”

Me: “You know, I have some co-workers who would probably lo-o-ove to hear this conversation. Really the only thing you get for playing ultimate for 20 years is you get to be forty.”

Anyway, I did show my MAD SKILLZ by catching the first score of the season, and by executing the first of a three-throw score later on (with a forehand, no less – my forehand is not exactly my best throw). I also learned that even though there are people on the team who are better than I am at both running and throwing, experience does count for something: Someone asked what a “poach” is. (Here’s a glossary if you really want to know.)

I got pretty sore by the end of the night, and remembered that I don’t really use my quads for bicycling, but I use them a lot for running. Fortunately I didn’t pull anything, but I’m pretty stiff this morning. (This is where Debbi says, “That’s because you never stretch afterwards!”) It was fun, though! Yay, another season of SBUL!

Articles about Nate Silver

An article at New York magazine about Nate Silver, the brains behind Five Thirty Eight, the election web site we’ve all been reading daily of late. (via Daring Fireball)

There’s also an article at the University of Chicago Magazine on Silver’s baseball analysis exploits, as well as his Wikipedia entry.

Since Silver’s stock-in-trade is statistical analysis of real-world phenomena, it shouldn’t be a surprise that he also made a living playing poker during the Internet poker boom. (Maybe he still does, I dunno.)

The Mother of Crappy Weeks

Okay, that might be an exaggeration. I mean, it’s not like I got into a car accident or had a death in the family or anything that bad. But this week has been just one thing after another.

  1. I mentioned on Sunday that one of my credit card numbers had apparently been stolen, so I closed down the account and had them send me a new card with a new account. The card was supposed to arrive on Tuesday, but it didn’t. So that was stressful. It did arrive on Wednesday, though, and I’ve used it, so that’s good. I still have to go update all my recurring bills with the new number though. Argh.
  2. Work this week has been a never-ending series of Stuff. About five different projects that popped up all at once needing immediate attention. Juggling those – and trying to actually get the coding done on them – has been quite an effort.
  3. I took the cats in for their annual check-up, and the vet recommended I switch them off of hairball control cat food, since apparently it contains a mild laxative in it, which might explain some of the bowel issues the cats have been having (for which he’s taking a round of antibiotics to help clean things out, too). Naturally we’d just bought two 20-pound bags of the stuff last weekend. I took one in and exchanged it, and we’ll use the other one to wean them onto the new food gradually.
  4. This morning the vet calls and tells me that both Newton and Jefferson have elevated thyroid levels. Newton’s is quite elevated, and not really unexpected. Jefferson’s is somewhat elevated, and is rather surprising since he’s a low-key kitty. So Newton gets to start on drugs to control his thyroid (a condition which might also explain his bowel issues, and his gradual weight loss over the last couple of years), and Jefferson is getting another test and might also get the drugs.

    Hopefully I can get them pilled without much trouble with the help of pill pockets. Otherwise it’s going to be a real pain in the ass, and/or expensive if I have to switch to a different method of drug delivery.

  5. This morning I noticed that my bike’s rear wheel was out of true. This afternoon I noticed that in fact it has popped a spoke. This is the wheel which was popping 1-2 spokes per year a few years ago, and which had its rim replaced a couple of months ago. This is really not cool. I may have a new bike in my future. And you can bet it won’t be a Bianchi, given how this one’s worked out.

    Sadly the repair shop is booked up for the next week and a half. Makes me wonder if I should locate a shop that can give me faster turn-around times.

  6. The really surreal thing is when I called the bike shop this afternoon: Whoever picked up sounded like they were about 5 years old. Our conversation went something like this:

    Me: Hello?

    Them: Hello.

    Me: Is this <name of store>?

    Them: Yes.

    Me: I’d like to make an appointment to bring my bike in.

    Them: Okay.

    Me: <weirded-out silence>

    Them: <starts babbling into the phone wordlessly>

    I just shook my head and hung up the phone. I decided to go to coffee and try again when I got back. This time I got a real person and made an appointment. I didn’t ask about the earlier call, though. I checked the number at the time and was sure it was the right number, but maybe it was a wrong number. I dunno.

  7. The house painting is still going on. I went out to water my plants – which are down on the patio rather than on the porch where they usually live – and tracked dirt into the house this morning. Gah. I’ll be really glad when the painting is done. I’m certainly done with it. Hopefully only one more week.

Speaking of one more week, on the bright side I have next week off for vacation. Which after this week I really, really need. As always I have plenty of stuff to do, even if my plans to go for some bike rides have been deep-sixed by the popped spoke.

It can’t be much worse than this week. And if it is, then I’ll really be unhappy.

A Phelpsian Post

The Olympics seem to be on everyone’s mind lately, so here are a couple of the neater things I’ve found on the Web about them:

First, frame-by-frame evidence of Michael Phelps’ 0.01-second victory in the 100-meter butterfly. Looks pretty conclusive to me. (via Daring Fireball)

After winning 8 gold medals at this year’s contests, maybe Michael Phelps would like to star in some film roles. Here’s one he seems well-suited for.

Well-suited! Har! But seriously, the resemblance is uncanny.

Moment of Clarity

So I’m working on a story tonight (yes, at the coffee shop; yes, I know I’m not fooling anyone) and getting pretty bummed about how it’s going. The writing feels forced and artificial, stilted sentence construction, not jocular enough. Sure, the scenario is rather downbeat, and it’s supposed to be an introspective piece, but it still just feels all wrong. The main character is talking about going to his new home in a new city and what he sees on the way there.

So all this is sucking and I keep telling myself that it’s just a shitty first draft and once I get a good hunk of it written I can go back and edit it into shape.

Then he finally gets there and meets another one of the characters and suddenly there’s, you know, dialogue and jocularity and stuff.

So yeah, all that earlier stuff? Needs to be edited right out of existence. Anything worthwhile in there can be filled in later, during an episode when something’s actually happening.

Sometimes I just need to be smacked upside the head, I guess.

Bicycling Update

Tuesday I took my bike in for its annual service. I have a Bianchi Eros (in “brilliant blue”, not in their signature “weird green”) which I bought back in 2002, and I have mixed feelings about it. Mostly I think I got a bad rear wheel when I bought it, which led to a couple of years of popped spokes and bent rims, although I think it also took me a little while to get used to taking care of it, such as not over-inflating the tires. I had them rebuild the wheel with new spokes a couple of years ago, and it’s been much better since.

Anyway, the bike’s been making lots of funny sounds recently, and the rear rim was clearly out of true, so I wanted it to get fixed up, since I’m biking in to work twice a week this year.

Well, it turns out the rim was not just bent, it was cracking. When I picked it up they showed me how two of the holes where the spokes attach to the rim were cracking across the rim, which was clobbering its structural integrity. So I had them rebuild the wheel with a new rim, and I biked in yesterday. And wow what an improvement: The bike is nearly silent, and the ride feels much smoother and easier. Combined with the other basic maintenance, such as turning the gears, it almost feels like a brand new bike!

The guy at the shop said I got my money’s worth out of the old rim, so I guess I can’t complain. Hopefully I can go a few years without any significant trouble from the bike, now. Because next time I start having major problems with it, I might just replace it.

Space: 1999

I’m frightened to report that I popped an episode of Space: 1999 tonight into the VCR, specifically, “Dragon’s Domain”.

Space: 1999 was a childhood favorite of mine, and I still had fond memories of it in young adulthood – but at that point memories are all they were, since I hadn’t seen an episode in years at that point. In the 90s I found a couple of videotapes of episodes at an SF convention and plonked down some ridiculous price to pick them up.

They’re, you know, not very good.

The acting could be best described as “wooden”. Martin Landau shows less range than William Shatner at his most Shatnerian, Barbara Bain seems vaguely similar to Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, and Barry Morse seems like a slightly drugged Isaac Asimov. Eeg.

The story involves a carniverous, hypnotic, disappearing space alien which lives in a sargasso of spaceships which somehow moved itself from the edge of Earth’s solar system to a location much further away. (Though remember that this is the series in which the mon is blasted out of Earth’s orbit at faster-than-light speeds, and yet which slows down to sublight speeds when it enters another solar system.) The creature is defeated through nonsensical means (with an axe).

And honestly this is pretty typical of an episode of the first season of the series. The second season turned from emphasizing the horror of outer space to becoming an action/adventure series, but it wasn’t really either an improvement or a decline; the whole series was just fatally flawed.

And yet, watching this episode tonight there are brief moments when I think, “This could have been cool.” The laser pistols are neat. The scenes with the Eagles flying above Moonbase Alpha evoke a certain feeling, that humans are surviving even in this barren environment with only a bleak hope. The notion that by this episode they’d been drifting in space for over two years. And of course the Eagles have that cool modular design. There’s also a throwaway moment when Commander Koenig (Landau) mentions that his predecessor on the base had left a bunch of junk in his office which Koenig was going through and salvaging, which made me think that of course any human habitat is going to build up junk as people fail to clean it out, but in these peoples’ circumstances that trash could be treasure indeed. The series is completely oblivious to the more profound implications of these little ideas, it’s just an adventure series. But still.

Sometimes I daydream what it would take to try to resurrect Space: 1999 as a serious science fiction series. It’s a mind game, since the series is so ludicrous by any serious SF standards, far more so than the original Battlestar Galactica was. You could have an experiment with an alien device go awry and drop the moon into the network of wormholes across the galaxy. Really play up the challenge of trying to keep 300-odd people alive on the moon using technology which we might actually achieve in a century or so, and how their mental state changes when living in isolation from the rest of humanity for years. Have some really alien aliens, not just guys with big hair and forehead bumps, or even just pull in the old chestnut of humans on Earth just being an offshoot of an older, starfaring species (which popped up in the original series, too). I’m not saying it would be a great series, but what would it take to try to make it a good one?

All very silly, I know. Space: 1999 will remain a bad TV series which has been mostly forgotten by almost everyone who ever watched it. But somehow there’s just enough there to make me think stuff like this, that maybe there’s something here that could have worked, in other hands, given a different treatment.

After all, something makes me pop that videotape in once in a while to watch an episode. That’s not something I ever feel moved to do with, say, The Six Million Dollar Man.