I haven’t done a silly Internet quiz in a while, so I happily followed Michael May‘s example with this one. The questions were leading — if you’re into adventure stories at all, you’ll easily guess which character each question is describing — but it killed five minutes and I’m pleased with the results:

Quiz brought to you by
Tripbase – Vacation Ideas

If you’ve never read King Solomon’s Mines, run to the library or click over to Amazon straightaway. It’s a great tale, even if it is an obvious product of its times (i.e., it’s Victorian, and that includes Victorian attitudes toward race and gender), and Quatermain is an obvious inspiration for the quintessential adventurer of modern pop culture, Indiana Jones, if that piques your interest at all. There have been two film versions that I’m familiar with, the 1950 version with Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger (which is pretty fun), and the 1985 version with Richard Chamberlain and a young Sharon Stone (this one can be a certain kind fun if you’re into bad movies, but be warned before you press “play” that it can’t be described as “good” in any of the usual ways). And of course Sean Connery played Quatermain in the execrable film League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; he was the only good thing about that pile of steaming camel dung…

The Girlfriend has acquired the mildly annoying habit of stuffing straw wrappers, napkins, crumpled-up receipts, and other little bits of paper detritus into the cup holders of my beloved Mustang. It’s not that big a deal, and I suppose it’s really my own fault because I’ve always resisted hanging a trash bag from the gear shift like most people do. But still, neither of us ever seems to remember to remove this crap immediately when we get home, so it tends to build up and make my car look kinda white-trashy. And it reduces the functionality of the cup holder, too, since cups don’t sit evenly on an uneven wad of junk. They tend to tip and tilt, and if they’re full, they’ll spill a little, which makes the cup holder and the debris layer sticky, and, well… it’s just not an optimal situation, as my friend Jack would say.

So I was delighted yesterday to discover that this trash problem takes care of itself if you accelerate to 60 mph with the top down on a brilliant sunny evening. It’s unclear whether it’s strictly necessary to have Foghat’s “Slow Ride” booming from the stereo in order to actuate the de-trashification process, but I recommend it anyhow because it’s a totally bitchin’ song.

(Incidentally, I realize I never reported on how the repairs to my car came out… there was a bit of heartburn because the body shop used a “pre-owned” door to replace my damaged one after promising to use a new one, but they did a really nice job of matching the paint and I doubt if 98% of people looking at the car could tell anything had ever happened. Still bugs me that the accident happened at all, but I guess it turned out all right.)

Good lord… I’m offline for a few days and Bea Arthur dies, the news media does its best to convince everyone that Captain Trips has broken out and we’re all doomed, some bonehead decides it’d be really cool to photograph Air Force One over New York City without bothering to tell everyone not to panic when they see a low-flying jumbo jet being pursued by an F-16, and Arlen Specter switches parties.

You know, sometimes it’s a good thing to be uninformed about what’s going on in the world…

(Incidentally, my weekend road trip was grand. There was naturally a huge backlog waiting for me at the office this morning, but I’ll try to find the time to jot down some travel stories in the next little while…)

Here in the clean light of a new morning, I realized the previous entry makes it appear that I’m in a really bad mental space. Well, I was for a couple of days, but let me assure any concerned loyal readers out there that I’m all right. I started recovering as soon as it became apparent the insurance companies weren’t going to give me any hassles, and I mostly unclenched once the car went into the shop and it felt like some progress was being made. I’m still unhappy the accident happened at all, of course, and that my formerly “like-new” car isn’t so much anymore. I get very attached to my things and I have a really hard time when something happens to them. But the worst of my emotional storm has passed. I just got wound up as I writing last night.

As I mentioned, the wreck was basically the final cue for a major case of the blues that’s been lurking in the wings for a while. A lot of shit has been getting under my skin lately: anxiety over my job and how secure it may or may not be, irritation with all the hysterical political nonsense that’s been going around (honestly, right-wing gun-lovers, no one is coming to take your Preciouses away, not even those nasty hobbitses, er, Democrats), disgust at the growing plague of panhandlers and scummy-looking kids that hang around the train platform near my office (I’ve got a lot of sympathy for the homeless, but enough is freakin’ enough, people!). Disgust with a lot of things, really… the reinvigorated culture wars, willful ignorance and intractable bigotry, ubiquitous marketing, almost-as-ubiquitous graffiti, the lack of consideration people have for their fellow citizens, traffic, road construction that makes traffic worse, the fact that I can no longer find a radio station I really, honestly like, and a host of other complaints both large and small. I’ve been tired and cranky and fed up and feeling like everything went really wrong somewhere. I’ve been feeling, in fact, something like this:

Fortunately, I’m about to get my moment alone, and I don’t even have to shoot anyone, no matter how tempting that might be. Well, alone plus one. The Girlfriend and I are setting off on a little road trip tomorrow, an exploration of southern Utah with a stop in Zion National Park, a detour to Vegas to check in with some friends we’ve not seen in a while, and finally, an outdoor concert starring my main man, Rick Springfield. Yes, I am a dork. No, worse, since I’m traveling over 100 miles to see him… I’m a groupie.

First, however, I’ve got a very important dinner date with the two people who made all this possible. Today is my parents’ 45th wedding anniversary. I’m sure I am no less amazed at how long that seems than they are…

If you listen much to National Public Radio, one of the things you notice is how the names of all the hosts don’t sound much like, say, your name. There’s a lot of ethnic diversity in NPR’s ranks, for one thing — on any given broadcast, you’re likely to hear the voices of Lakshmi Singh, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, or Sylvia Poggioli, for example — but even the more “regular” names just have a certain ring to them: Neal Conan (any name from the Hyborian Age is guaranteed cool, right?), Jason Beaubien, Salt Lake’s own Howard Berkes, Noah Adams, Steve Inskeep… these simply aren’t names you’re likely to encounter in the real world. I’ve long lusted after a cool name, the sort of name that invites respect and conjures images of exotic lands, daring deeds, and arcane knowledge. An NPR name.

Now, thanks to the link my buddy MikeG sent me this afternoon, I can have such a moniker. The formula is surprisingly simple:

Here’s how it works: You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name. Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.

And just like that my name becomes — are you ready? — Regjinald St. Goar.

Regjinald St. Goar, named for a delightful little village on the Rhine River in Germany. I like it! So what’s yours?

There was another round of layoffs at work today, a big one. Looking for the positive aspects, it did take out a couple of people who’ve been thorns in my side, but also a few more friends, which really sucks. As before, I remain reasonably confident that my own job isn’t going anywhere any time soon. However, watching the slow parade of the unfortunate march one by one into the HR office and then back to their cubes to collect their personal effects with a blank-eyed escort hovering nearby… well, I can think of grimmer sights but I prefer not to. The worst was seeing a sweet, soft-spoken man in his fifties struggle to control his tears as he took down his Ghosts calendar and laid it carefully into the top of a packed bankers box. I didn’t speak to him, didn’t say goodbye, and I wish I had. I was oddly embarrassed, as if I personally had done something to him merely by not getting my own phone call from HR. I think I can imagine what he was thinking, though. At his age — not quite old, but a long way from the eager-eyed hipsters fresh out of college who swarm through our industry like goldfish in a pet store — he was probably imagining how he’s going to look in a blue smock with “Welcome to WalMart” printed on the chest.

Not quite as iconic an image as that famous portrait Dorothea Lange captured 73 years ago, but it haunts me just the same…

Like the title says, “Blarg.” I feel like I’ve been dragged sideways through an old-fashioned keyhole, then shaken out and tossed over the back of a chair like a pair of unwashed Levi’s. Which is my colorful way of saying that the past week has been unusually rough. I’m utterly drained, in just about every way you can think of: physically, intellectually, emotionally. Soon to be financially, too, thanks to that tax situation I mentioned a while back.

So what’s been going on that’s so terrible? Well, for one thing, there have been a couple of items in the news this week that have hit me like a solid fist to the belly; they’ll be getting their own blog entries when I get the chance to write them up. I’ve also had to contend with my semi-annual journey into the Black Hole of Depression; it hits every year around this time, probably as a result of the gloomy, final sputters of winter, as well as the usual annual reminders of things I prefer to keep to myself. Let’s just say that every so often, I notice I’m a long, long way from being the man I used to believe I was, and the life I used to think I was destined to live. I can’t help but imagine my 21-year-old self would be incredibly disappointed in my 39-year-old self, and that really gets me down.

The big problems this week, however, have been health-related. The Girlfriend and I have both been sicker than dogs, and, in her case, things got bad enough to require a trip to the emergency room.

Continue Reading…

“Oh, how I love the future. How else would I be able to relive my past?”

–Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer