20-VIII-2007.
Nothing much on 19th - I was working most of the day, and so were Go and Ricardo. Lena was trying out the graphic tablet and the accompanying apps for it on Go's machine, namely Maya and perhaps some early version of zBrush. She didn't have a screen of her own, but she brought her knitting or crochet, sat on the terrace and had the 2$ radio from Walmart, sized about a half matchbox, used earplugs, had coffee and spent the time like that. I'd join her for smoke breaks from time to time.
It looked like this, though the shot was made on 20th - nothing much happened during that day either. The bicycle became a problem later. Like most of the other gated communities, this too is under the strict rule of its homeowners' association, whose sole purpose is not to provide for maximum comfort or standard of living, but the perceived real estate value. Now since a bicycle on the 2nd, sorry, 3rd floor can be seen from, perhaps, the low rent house on the other side of the wall, and with it the place looks as if someone lives in it, it's a no-no. The bike had to go into the shed, or somewhere in the living room. They could have kept it by the stairs - there's only one more apartment on that floor (or perhaps three?) and there's lots of room there, but still it's out in the open and theoretically available to thieves, as anyone with a card can open the gate, and there are no guards watching, perhaps one sleepy guy at the monitors. So it ended up in the living room, a few months later. Not that it mattered much now, she had a car and a licence.
In the evenings we gathered around a common dinner. Go somewhere learned to love the lentils, I remember she made it at least twice during my last stay. This time mom was the cook, having much more time to do it right. We even had a drink or two. Ricardo would join us briefly, but would then find a good moment to sneak out and return to his monitor.
During the nightly smoke breaks, the landscape wasn't much, despite the view to south, to downtown. The only thing which attracted the eye, almost like an earworm, were a couple of towers, laid out rather close to each other, with blinking red lights. They didn't blink in lockstep, but rather oddball - at times they'd blink together, then opposite. And I started counting. Between two overlaps, the left [one] would do 19 blinks, the right [one] 18. That's when I lost interest, now knowing the cause.
Avocado was popular this week. There was even one (seed only) in a glass of water on the terrace, propped to surface by three toothpicks poked radially into it, supposedly that's the way to make it sprout a new plant. Years later I heard of one case where this actually worked, to some extent - the plant grew for a few months, then croaked.
I know one evening we watched the „Little shop around the corner“ from the monochrome era, and understood how „You got mail“ was just a cute sugarcoated and simplified remake, nothing more.
In Feds, Jan found another way to make thing ambiguous - there's a field enc_type, which can mean encoding type, enclosure type or a few other things, but no, it's encounter type or some other WTF expression, and actually denotes the template in questionnaires (!). So it goes, as Vonnegut would say.
On 20th, Go got us into her Honda and gave as a tour of the town. She knew a place where to park, and then we just walked around for a couple of hours. Several buildings were related to movies, what with Disney's Buena Vista having a whole street for itself, and there's also a Disneyland. This is a movie theatre. It seems it was built during the brief fling between the american so-called architecture and brutalism. Which passed quickly, and then they happily returned to their traditional imitation of Jefferson's immitation of french immitation of Acropolis on one side, and glass boxes on the other.
There was one building which was pretty much three cylinders, supposed to resemble stacks of boxes with film reels.
And someone has programmers in mind... as probable customers for real estate, or at least an empty lot.
We also walked around some lake, with good view of the surrounding skyscrapers. The shell-shaped Disney pavillion wasn't as impressive, architecturally, as the luxurious public toilet, all in glass bricks. The city was amazingly empty at the time, though it wasn't too late - perhaps 20 to 22:00 - at the time. Even the bars we passed had lots of empty seats.
Twentyfirst, on UA
>The Surgeon General has determined that they are bad for you.
Is he really a surgeon? Did he perform any surgery ever?
Is he really a general? Where are his armies?
Was it really undetermined until he did?
Sheesh, what a language... never say what they mean, never mean what they say.
From this I later made a longer article on my blog, when I found the sentence „surgeon general has decided that quitting smoking now greatly reduces the risk of getting cancer“, with additional questions:
- why now, what about those who quit last week, was that premature?
- it now reduces the risk, did it previously increase it, and will it again?
- what if he delayed the decision, would that invalidate the „now“?
- what would have happened if he decided differently - would it change the situation? What's the scope of his authority, really?
- I heard the guy isn't a general at all, he's got some navy rank. Impostor?
- I read this on a box in a smoeshop, which was there on the shelf for weeks, so when exactly was that „now“?
About school rules:
I'm repeatedly amazed by how many rules American schools have. We thought we were oppressed and hindered by the house rules when we were kids/teenagers, but compared with the sample I got from my daughters from six schools (2 elementary, 2 middle, 2 high), it's 1984 all over in almost every school they went to. Luckily, the youngest is in a magnet program, where rules are much more relaxed, and the other two have already graduated, so I'm not being regularly fed the rubbish. Some of the things that totally shocked me:
- you can't just call home and say you'll go with a friend after school, if the friend takes a different bus. You need to bring a written letter from the parents that you'll be on a different bus, i.e. your improvised one-hour visit becomes a premeditated plan spanning two days
- you can't visit the toilet during a class without another writ, this time given by your teacher. anyone caught in the halls during class without a written cause of presence is a suspect
- you must not or you must access your locker between classes, depending on the school. There was even one where there was no rule about that.
There were a lot of other that were so out of my world that I wasn't able to memorize them.
There were not enough beds. There was the queen-sized one we bought for Go, which then they used it while studying, and one single bed I brought along when they moved last year (previously Lena's, but she got a new one and this was unused). So we two slept on some mats, and guess what, we slept like babies. Excellent. Just one inch thick foam with some synthetic wrapper, plus some thin cotton duvet on top of it.
This picture is one of a dozen we made while sitting there, trying to decide whether to sleep now or later. As usual, when there's more than three of us in conversation, it's like a pinball, the conversation zigzags unpredictably and fresh ideas and jokes just spark. Good fun, we fall under our own influence whenever we have a quorum.
Mentions: Feds, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian
27-VII-2022 - 5-VII-2026