Todd Stadler's blog

Laugh ... now!

Written at: 23:59 28 May, 2002 permalink

Not too long ago, I found myself once again drawn by the proverbial siren song that is Television Preview, the event wherein you watch crappy television and in all likelihood are tested for your response to commercials.

I have always enjoyed the lousiest of television programming because it rates so well on my patented Entertainment Scale.

The Entertainment Scale works like this: imagine an infinitely long axis, stretching from negative infinity to positive infinity. Shows fall along the scale based on their quality (cable access is close to negative infinity, the Simpsons are close to positive infinity), but their entertainment is determined by the absolute value of their position. Thus, cable access and the Simpsons are highly entertaining, although they vary greatly in quality. Most sitcoms, on the other hand, are neither bad nor good enough to make them bearable.

As it is difficult to find television that ranks high on the Entertainment Scale, I have traditionally sought out more lowbrow stuff. Thus did I find myself eager to attend the Television Preview evening a few weeks back.

The last time I attended such an evening, there was crappy TV in abundance. Indeed, I saw a show that I would later characterize as "the worst thing I ever saw on TV, hands down". Which, you can imagine, was highly entertaining. What new treats would this second evening of consumer rating offer?

It turns out that it would hold nothing new. It was the same stupid program, consisting of the aforementioned stinker Soulmates and the disinterment of Valerie Harper that is City.

So why did I stay and watch these shows after I found out that they were the same ones I had previously watched? Because I'm a scientist, dangit! And also because I have a perverse sense of fun.

I managed to keep myself entertained while watching psycho-stupido-action-drama Soulmates by making all sorts of snide comments to my friends (who, it should be noted, had not previously attended this program, but desperately wanted to after hearing my description of it). It's what all the kids are doing these days.

However, the sitcom City didn't lend itself to such cynical entertainment, and I was thus forced to try something different.

I vowed to laugh along with the laugh track of said sitcom, both in frequency and amplitude. That is, I tried to match the canned audience guffaw for guffaw and chortle for chortle.

I will say right now it was not an easy task. Indeed, I grew rather tired of the activity within the first five minutes of the show, simply because the laugh track fired off every other line.

My brain found it particularly difficult to laugh so frequently when it clearly wasn't warranted. The only thing that kept me going was realizing the absurdity of my chuckling, which itself was far funnier than most things the show's writers had come up with.

I mean, when was the last time you heard anyone laughing as heartily as a show's laugh track? [Huh ... never really] Don't you think there's something wrong with that? [Yeah, that is wrong!]

Why do we tolerate crappy TV simply because a clearly biased fake audience is enjoying it? [Hey, good question! Maybe TV isn't so great!]

And how is it that we find nothing unusual in entertainment that tells us how and when to react? At least the most maudlin of movies abstracts its emotional manipulation into a really obvious music score. But imagine going to a movie where there are crying and gasping sounds being piped in at crucial moments. Wouldn't that annoy you? [Yeah, it would! Most American entertainment is awful!]

[Let's go do something more productive with our lives than watch television!]

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no time for tea time

Written at: 23:49 28 May, 2002 permalink

One month into my temp job (and still going strong ... I guess), I've noticed that I don't have near enough time for everything.

No longer free and unemployed, I find all the projects and activities I want to take part in are still lying scattered around my bedroom floor along with various clothing items and random pieces of paper.

I wonder why I feel the need to constantly be doing something. Why do I feel that I'm a bad man if I haven't kept up on all the latest movies (popular and arty), music, and books, not to mention the general goings-on of life on this planet? I realize that doing all those things is nice, but when did it become necessary? Sure, I respect people who know a lot and can talk about many different subjects, but do I have to be just like them?

And that's just the things I want to consume in this world (other than a nice tall glass of chocolate milk). Never mind all the things I want to bring into this world - web pages, images, photos, writings, plays, movies, songs, concepts, all of it.

I try to convince myself I'll get around to doing it all by making lists of what I must do, but even that eventually gets to be too much. I'm sure that somewhere in my room is a sticky note with the words "try to consolidate all to-do lists into one list", among other tasks, written on it.

All of this is rather busy for a guy who greatly values the idea behind vacations - long vacations, at that. I firmly believe that rest is necessary, not just for the body, but the mind. And from experience I know that creativity is a lot easier when a body is well-rested, not trying to do everything at once.

And yet my resting is often rather half-hearted. Rather than sitting on my front porch, avowedly doing nothing, I might sit on my couch and watch some stupid TV show, later realizing how emotionally manipulated I feel for being made to care about a fictional group of people.

In the end, isn't everything we do meaningless at some level anyway? Why do I put such pressure on myself to do particular things? Why can't I just enjoy being, consuming or creating whatever I do? I guess the answer to that is both complex and simple - that's who I am, and I like what I like.

Ah, well. At least I can turn to my web page and vent, right?

Hmph. Half the reason I'm writing this is that I hate noticing that I haven't written anything (much less anything clever) in a long time. It's funny how free people like myself keep inventing taskmasters to keep us from relishing our freedom too much.

Piffle.

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johnny paycheck drops you a line

Written at: 00:37 14 May, 2002 permalink

Data entry is a funny job.

It certainly doesn't take a whole lot of brain power. The main skill needed is the ability to type quickly. No, strike that. The main skill needed is the ability to tolerate monotony. Mononononononononotony.

And yet it's not quite the brainless job I was expecting. For instance, I don't find that I have tons of time to ponder life's imponderables while data-entering. Instead, my brain is employed as an overpowered memory unit, holding information my eyes take in until my fingers can output it into the keyboard.

As such, I spend most of the day repeating numbers to myself. I am closer than I've ever been to understanding the life of a computer.

And after a few days, the numbers have started to take on heretofore unexplored qualities. I might type a number like 121506 on the numeric keypad and think, "Yeah, that makes sense." Or I'll find myself keying in 627381 and think, "I don't much like that number."

Then again, maybe this isn't so unusual for a guy who at one point had memorized 120 digits of pi - in order!

Still, when I found myself walking around downtown thinking about short sequences of digits for no good reason, I know I was just a short hop away from sleeping in a cardboard box. Or destroying the world. Whichever.

I tried keeping my mind occupied by listening to music, but I found this did not solve all my problems. For instance, it's difficult to not want to type to the rhythm of whatever music you're listening to. This is tricky for fast songs, less than productive for slow songs, and downright silly when you're listening to Rush's YYZ.

It's also difficult to not feel like just another cog in the machine when you're data-entering to Radiohead. Maybe it's just me.

I found it necessary to make the job of data entry more exciting by turning it into a game. Just like Mary Poppins would do, only without the scampish Cockney characters.

Given what I had to work with - namely, several overflowing tubs of returned mail - I entertained myself by looking for unusual names and places, as well as spiffy "return to sender" stamps. It may not be as exciting as clipping your toenails, but it passes the time.

hand-y guide

But before I tell you of my favorite proper nouns encountered in my data entry job, you have to prepare yourself. See, this list is only funny if you are sufficiently bored by mindless, repetitive tasks. So go read all the Sally Forth comic strips online and then come back and read these much funnier (and only slightly wordier) lists. Ho ho!

Favorite addresses:

Borkette Lane
Camino de Chelly
Flowers Crossing Road
Housatonic Street
FM 359 1/2 mile south of FM 1093 - For those who don't know, FM stands for farm-to-market, and the fact that someone's address was simply the intersection of two farm-to-market roads implies that they were in the middle of nowhere.

Favorite people names:

Brenda Brickhouse
G. Emerick Buttermore
Jhana Chinamasta
Renauld Chinapoo
Conner S. Corner
Frank Crotty
Daniel Beverly Daniels
W. S. Delicate (who lives on Perennial Lane, no less. Given that I work for a horticultural publisher, this is weird)
Harold Funk
John Gyorfi
Horatio Haggard
Elvis Mbesa
Ed McMickle
Mercelant Ocean
Yam Rector
Ruth Schmeckpeper
Dr. Gorgonio Solidum
Melanie Spoo
Gloria Tweedy
Joy Wiener

Favorite city names:

Enumclaw, Washington
Fuquay Varina, North Carolina
Ham Lake, Minnesota
Koshkonong, Missouri
Miccosukee, Florida
Mystic, Iowa
Oconomowoc, Wisconsin
Puxico, Missouri
Sammamish, Washington
Schenectady, New York
Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Skokie, Illinois
Tobaccoville, North Carolina
Yonkers, New York
Ypsilanti, Michigan
Yreka, California

So there you have it. Low grade temp work entertainment magically transformed into low grade web page entertainment. Whee.

But if there's one thing you take away from the precious minutes you spent reading this entry, it's this: the physical location of the afterworld. You see, while sorting through the many returned catalogs, I found one that was marked "deceased", implying that the intended recipient not only didn't live at that address, he didn't live anywhere.

But unlike most such returned catalogs, this one also had a forwarding address. And it directed all future mail to Abbotsford, British Columbia. Based on what I know of British Columbia, I assume this is heaven, not hell. But I'll look into it. Just thought you should know.

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the future is now! part ii

Written at: 09:22 07 May, 2002 permalink

Another example of life in the Internet Age occurred while I was reading CNN today.

I had been following the story of the mailbox bomber ever since I read his Fight-Club-inspired screed concerning fear, death, and, of course, government control.

So when I read on CNN.com this afternoon that the FBI had issued an all-points bulletin for one Luke John Helder, I did what came naturally to me, I searched for his name using Google.

I was somewhat surprised to find that there was only one page that matched his name, that of a Minnesota band called Apathy. That page links to another Apathy page (which is down as the ISP deals with the server load). And the latter page links to the band's MP3.com site, complete with angsty tunes about conformity and such.

As details were revealed throughout the day about Mr. Helder, it quickly became apparent that the singer in this band was, in fact, the same as the guy the FBI wanted - same state, same college, and same politics.

What's my point? Well, I was struck by my ability to find out something about this now-famous character before the news media reported it (CNN's page on the story now mentions the band Apathy). And not just to find out that he was in a band, but to listen to the band's songs. All within a matter of minutes of his name being released on CNN.

That may not be useful information, but it's still interesting. You know, I think that sentence pretty much sums up the Internet. Maybe not useful, but interesting.

And while my car may not fold up into a briefcase yet, I still get the suspicion that the times, they are a-changing.

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the future is now! part i

Written at: 08:22 07 May, 2002 permalink

I had one of those "hey, I'm in the future now" moments this past weekend while helping my friends prepare for a party.

My friends told me they needed help with music for the party, namely in finding some good dance music.

Now comes the first of many geeky admissions. I'm not ashamed to tell you these things because if I'm going to be futuristic, I must of necessity be geeky. Think of how the formerly geeky reputation of computers has given way to the ability to do hip things like procrastinate and find porn!

Anyhow, it has been the practice for many years now at my friends' parties that the music be played by a laptop shuffling through MP3s. And while this seems horribly nerdy to me (although not so much for a bunch of engineers), it is also very practical.

No more spending hours planning out a playlist and then hours more recording it. No, MP3s can be ripped or downloaded very quickly, and then it is easy to shuffle them around in a playlist until the order is what you want it to be.

Given that, I was trying to find some good dance MP3s that weren't the same old songs we hear at every party. I was looking for a few songs in particular I'd heard at dance clubs around town, but I didn't know anything about them other than the few repetitive words in them.

So naturally I went over to Google and typed in those lyrics and found the songs' artists. I then went over to CNET to find out the best way to download MP3s from the internet. I downloaded the software, and then proceeded to download the songs.

While I was doing that, I was ripping songs from my own CDs and editing them so as to remove overly long intros and other annoying bits.

When I was done, I FTPed all the songs to my web page, and my friend downloaded them onto the laptop, which played the music into his stereo for our party.

At one level, it's pretty mundane stuff, really. Nothing any high school student couldn't do, I guess. But that's what's so amazing about it - that this sort of information flows so freely and easily.

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congratulations, oceanchild

Written at: 00:22 01 May, 2002 permalink

Is it any wonder I love her so?

Mere weeks after conquering an armada of marauding tenured professors intent on asking detailed chemistry questions, girlfriend Julia has again looked fear in the face and laughed. Heartily.

Her latest challenge - to find a job, and possibly a golden fleece, in Portland, Oregon (where I live, coincidentally) - was given the proverbial smackdown by Julia this past weekend.

While I find myself well into the third month of my job search without much success, Julia took mere days to convince the good folks at St. Mary's to pay her cold, hard cash (no word on the fleece, though) in exchange for teaching kids about chemistry.

And while I'd like to be all cross about her academic and employment superiority, I'm just too happy to have her in the same city as me without having to worry about when the return flight is.

It's odd - I wanted God to answer our many many prayers by giving us just this, but even I didn't expect Julia to get a job up here in a matter of days. Wow.

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Todd Stadler's blog

Laugh ... now!

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no time for tea time

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johnny paycheck drops you a line

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the future is now! part ii

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the future is now! part i

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congratulations, oceanchild

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