Toys 'R Fun

I finally gave up on film and bought a digital camera. Not a great one, but I found a refurbished 4MP Kodak point-and-shoot that's good enough for my limited purposes and abilities. I'm still figuring out how to get good shots, especially closeups. In good regular daylight I think I'm OK.



But in lower light I don't really know how to handle the flash yet. I tried this practice shot a couple of times, and this fuzzy piece of crap was the best one.



It's fun to play around with though. And I've learned that half of photography is picking the right subject.

More news from the asylum

When we moved to the new building, we got fairly expansive cubicle-style work spaces -- much more space than I need. To keep my desk from being totally empty and sterile, I got a pathetic little plant.



Sometimes a random action figure or bobblehead will appear:



And I printed out a couple of 8X10s and stuck them in $1 frames. I rotated them every couple of months. This being Sports and me being me, I started with this shot of Chris Perry:



Then there was this nice Ivan Rodriguez photo:



But then I went with this famous picture of Cristie Kerr after she won the LPGA's Longs Drugs Challenge.



It's a funny picture, but it has extra resonance for us in the office because we actually know Cristie. Or at least one guy, who played high school golf against her in Miami, knows her. By default, that makes her our favorite women's golfer.

Can you see where this is going? Yes, a couple of months later, out of the blue, I get called in and informed that there has been a complaint. The photo "creates a hostile environment," and it has to go.

Look, I don't really object in principle. Even though it's obviously a joke picture, I understand how it could be viewed as borderline (by a humorless idiot). What bothers me is: 1) This is a management team that does nothing about plagiarists and thieves on staff but got right on my ass about this; 2) They wouldn't tell me who dimed, which makes it feel like a suspiciously chickenshit move; but mainly 3) This picture was never displayed in an in-your-face manner. Partly intentionally, you almost had to be sitting in my chair to see it. It's in the corner, well hidden behind the monitor and not visible to a passerby:



The point being, someone really had to go to some effort to 1) see it, then 2) take offense, then 3) take time out of their day to go bitch about it. Fucking loser.

In the end, it's a picture of a golfer with a golf trophy. Because I can never take this kind of shit without resorting to bitter, obnoxious sarcasm, I immediately replaced it with a picture of our beloved Cristie with a more acceptable trophy:



And I vandalized my own nameplate a little bit.



Right now my only regret is that I didn't quite have the onions to use this picture.

"I'm 37, I'm not old..."

Well, I met a lovely young lady from Senegal with an awesome French accent at Lisa's soiree over the weekend. We went on the traditional symphony+dessert date, and it went nicely. She's smart, she likes Mahler, no complaints.

Except ... at the end when she was giving me the "I had a great time" spiel, she added, very sweetly, that I was proof of why it's better for her to date an older guy. Fuck, I never heard that one before. But I guess I was never older by double digits before. Fuck.

Well, if I want to feel young again, I have the Chicago Pipe Show this weekend. That's a crowd where I'm definitely one of the whippersnappers. I like to think of it as an Adult Entertainment Expo for absent-minded professors, country gentlemen, and Popeye. I never did one of those AEE-style show reports for the pipe show before (I don't think you'd enjoy the pictures as much), but here's a quick version of what I'll be looking for.

With both shows, the coolest thing is that you can meet the towering giants of that culture, the tip of the top. He's probably never heard himself described this way before, but Greg Pease is the Jenna Jameson of tobacco blending.



What would that make Karl-Heinz Joura and Lee Von Erck, other than master pipe carvers? Well, I don't want to push the analogy too far.



The pipe show actually might be better than AEE. For one thing, even if you can never really have a $3,900 Knudsen or Chonowitsch, you can pick up the object of your affection and handle it all you want (just be careful).



Outside the show hall, there will be people making deals from their hotel rooms. The off-site scene always reminds me of Taxi Driver, when Easy Andy is selling guns to Travis Bickle.



In the end, though, the goal is pretty much the same: just taking the time to properly enjoy seeing something beautiful.

Another domain name I don't need

I'm now the proud owner of scumandvillainy.com. I don't know what happened to the previous site there, but it's gone. It's rare that any even remotely Star Wars-related domains come open, so I grabbed it. I have no idea what I might ever do with it, but now I can use the spiffy email address wretchedhive@scumandvillainy.com.

The last stupid domain name I bought, of course, was youcanblowme.com, and I can still be reached at yeah@youcanblowme.com as well. When I set it up, I just threw up a pretty random front page. I guess Bonnie Bernstein was on TV at the time, and at the office we're big fans because of an infamous comment from a few years back. If I recall correctly, she was transitioning from talking to Dick Enberg to interviewing Dick Jauron, and blurted out, "Two Dicks! Wow!"

Anyway, for no reason at all, I grabbed a screen shot of bonniebernstein.com and made it the index page. And for the title, I just typed in "Two Dicks! Wow!" and never gave it another thought.

A N Y W A Y, I just took a look at the web stats for youcanblowme.com. Not a lot of hits, because none of the secret pages (I can't tell you what they are, it's a secret) are linked from the front page. So according to the "search query report" only 10 people have ever web-searched their way to this site. That's right, every one of them was running a search for "two dicks."