Monthly Archives: January 2010

Jan182010

He Fought Monsters

Reposting something from a couple years ago that still moves me and says what needs to be said on this particular federal holiday:

He may not have searched for lost treasure, discovered ancient civilizations, or killed aliens in outer space, but he was one of the bravest men this country’s ever known.

And he did fight monsters.

— Michael May

And now some of the greatest words ever spoken on American soil, right up there with the Gettysburg Address, in my humble opinion:

This is the promise, the duty, and the destiny of America. Equality, respect, and dignity for all, no matter who or what you may be. We’re still not there yet, but we’re getting closer all the time. And that’s pretty exciting…

Jan182010

Salvaging Flight 1549

In case you missed it, this past Friday was the one-year anniversary of the so-called “Miracle on the Hudson,” in which airline captain “Sully” Sullenberger successfully ditched his crippled Airbus A320 in the Hudson River alongside Manhattan without losing a single life. (Human life, that is; God only knows how many poor birds got themselves puree’d inside Flight 1549’s massive CFM International turbofan engines.)

This morning, there’s a new video floating around the ‘net that shows what happened after the passengers and crew were rescued. It’s a fascinating timelapse of the salvage operation that lifted the sunken airliner out of the freezing waters of the river and got it placed onto a barge. The photographer had a perfect vantage point, and the video is really quite beautiful. In particular, I found the ice surging and waning around the plane’s wing and vertical stabilizer — the only parts of 1549 that were above the water for three days — weirdly hypnotic. Give it a look:

Exclusive unseen video footage of the Miracle on the Hudson, flight 1549 New York City from David Martin on Vimeo.

I am one of those weirdos who sentimentalize and anthropomorphize machines, especially those that perform beyond expectations to save the lives of the people who ride within them, so I’m not at all ashamed to admit that I teared up a bit when 1549 re-emerges into the air. Of course, the music probably helps. It’s a selection from the soundtrack of Michael Bay’s Transformers, and I found it unexpectedly effective.

The guy who created this video, David Hugh Martin, has posted a number of still photos and some comments here; I found his video via Andrew Sullivan.

Jan122010

Sartre Never Ate at Sizzler on a Saturday Night

To the worthless lump of failed humanity whose obnoxious children ruined my dinner at Sizzler the other night, the guy who sat at a table with all the adults of your extended clan, obliviously stuffing your soft, quivering jowls with all-you-can-eat shrimp while your noisy little brats went unsupervised in a nearby booth and generally behaved (and sounded) as if they were playing on a jungle gym in some open-air playground about a mile away from civilization:

You suck.

No, seriously, you do.

You see, the fact that your meager dreams evaporated years ago and your self-respect is dead and buried beneath that admittedly awe-inspiring paunch of yours does not absolve you from your parental responsibilities to actually, you know, parent. Yes, I know the only glimmer of pleasure you can strain from your gray and miserable life is the time spent discussing football stats with your equally corpulent brother-in-law over heaping plates of fried crustaceans. And I’m certain that your admirable ability to completely ignore the high-pitched squealings of your misbehaved progeny is an adaptive mechanism to protect what little intellectual capacity you may have remaining in that stupid round noggin of yours. But believe me, what you seem so adept at filtering out while you eat was unbelievably irritating to every other person in the damn restaurant. And as you’re the one who spawned the offending creatures, the responsibility for them irritating me ultimately falls on your ample and well-cushioned shoulders. So allow me to offer you some suggestions on how you should have handled the situation…

Jan122010

Elvis at 75

I was just shy of my eighth birthday when Elvis Presley died at the age of 42. His was the first celebrity death — possibly the first death, period — that I can recall being aware of and understanding as death, i.e., the permanent state we’re all doomed to achieve sooner or later, which those we leave behind experience as loss and pain. It was, with no exaggeration, a transformative event in my life. You want to know the origins of my compulsive obituary-writing? Blame Elvis Presley. Or more precisely, blame the way our culture responded to his passing.

I actually wrote my very first dead-celebrity tribute for Elvis. I had this red leatherette agenda book, the sort of thing businesspeople scribbled their appointments in before the advent of Day Planners, PDAs, and BlackBerries, a piece of branded corporate swag. It was given to me by our neighbor’s adult daughter, who worked for an airline. I imagine she thought I’d enjoy looking at the photos of jets that were interspersed between the calendar pages. (She was correct, of course.) But even at that early age, I was trying to express myself in written words, to record the things that seemed to matter. In other words, I was dabbling at keeping my first diary in that book. And on a page dated August 16, 1977, I was inspired to write the following in the shaky, block-printed letters of a young boy who hated to practice his penmanship: GOODBYE ELVIS, WE’LL MISS YOU. (I think I probably stole that from Walter Cronkite’s evening broadcast that day, but hey, I had to learn how to say these things from someone, right?)

Jan062010

Congratulations Are in Order

Hear ye, hear ye (I’ve always wanted to say that):

My lovely Girlfriend, who has slaved tirelessly and with very little recognition for a wholesale carpet dealer for the past 10 years, was this afternoon elected to the position of Vice President of the Utah Floor Covering Association, an industry trade group concerned with, um, floor coverings. And the industry that trades in… floor… coverings. Ah, hell, the truth is I have no idea what the UFCA actually does, but I imagine I’m going to be learning much more about it over the next year. Anne has already informed me that I’ll be required to make myself available as her arm-candy for occasional functions, and she will likely be doing some business-related traveling as well. (The travel may or may not include me, depending on our respective schedules.) And, as if all this wasn’t exciting enough, she will most likely ascend to the presidency itself in only a year.

I’m very proud of her. I don’t know that this is going to be a game-changer or anything, but it’s bound to be a very interesting experience for her, and a good resume’ builder. And besides, “Madam Vice President” has kind of a sexy ring…

Jan062010

Status Updates in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

This either speaks to the utter banality and base immaturity of the average conversation on social-networking sites, or it serves to craft an endearingly human side to beloved but admittedly two-dimensional characters. Or something. Whatever is going on here, it makes me laugh:

There are a few more here
Via.

Jan042010

Back to the Grind

I had such plans for my annual holiday break. I was going to blog. A lot. I was going to sort through a couple thousand digital pictures I’ve taken over the past year and be brutal and efficient about deleting all the sub-par ones, and then I was going to Photoshop those that needed it and post the whole lot of them to Flickr. I was going to set up the digital picture frame my parents gave me for Christmas a year ago, and I was going to send long-overdue and just plain long emails to several people I haven’t contacted for a while. I was going to give my house a thorough cleaning, and go through my clothes and pull out a bunch of stuff I no longer wear and give it to charity, and I was going to sit in the sun streaming in through the window and read a fat novel and sip hot cocoa. I was going to listen to a whole mess of podcasts I’ve got saved on the computer and go to some movies, which, believe it or not, I haven’t really managed to do for the past couple months. I thought I might even take a nice drive up to Park City one afternoon and try breathing some less-smoggy air for a change. And when all that was done, I was going to actually write… not the lame-o crap I do around here all the time, but real writing, creative writing. Fiction, in other words, the stuff I used to think I was going to spend my life making.

And just how many of all those planned activities do you suppose I accomplished? Well… I managed to do a couple of memes for the blog. Yay me.

So what did I do over the break? I visited friends on Christmas Eve. I had a very rare stress-free Christmas Day with my parents. I spent an afternoon with my buddy Jer, who I only see a couple times a year because he lives in Vegas, and I enjoyed the annual reunion dinner with The Dudes, i.e., my buddies from the old multiplex days. I also enjoyed a New Year’s Eve video party with a different subset of friends I like to call The Usual Suspects. (Geeks that we are, the evening’s viewing selection was 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Of course.) And then I did penance for that party all the next day. (I’ve decided that champagne doesn’t agree with me; every time I drink it, I end up with one of those headaches that sits right behind your retinas and threatens to explode your eyeballs any time the treacherous daylight sneaks through a chink in the window blinds.)

I helped The Girlfriend’s parents organize and store their Christmas decorations, and was rewarded with a little road trip out into the hinterlands for lunch at one of those small-town greasy spoons I love so well, a place called the Stockton Miner’s Cafe (sorry, no web presence that I could find). I hung some framed photos that have been sitting on the living-room floor for several months. And I managed to see a movie, Guy Ritchie’s take on Sherlock Holmes. (For the record, I liked it. Well, I liked the story and the performances, at least — people who are screaming about revisionism don’t know their Holmes — but I am never going to get used to the modern way of putting together an action scene. Undercrank the camera, freeze for a moment, then overcrank and smash cut to something else, all shot in close-ups so you can never see where anything is in relation to anything else… ugh. The action in Sherlock is a lot more intelligible than the messy fights in those damn Bourne movies, but I still long for a nice steadicam shot once in a while.)

And all that stuff was great, it really was. But now, as Ray Liotta says at the conclusion of Goodfellas, it’s all over, and I’m back at work in the comma mines and feeling like a tremendous failure for not crossing off a few items on that “to-do” list…