So, a productive at-home vacation is past.  We have been living in our house for almost four years and this last week I finally got around to putting up the various odd pictures on the basement walls.  Crookedly.  After putting together some storage shelves, I needed to move a shelf that I previously put up near my desk down there.  So after the first attempt with the crappy drywall anchors, I noticed the shelf seemed askew.  Using trusty spirit level, I determined it was listing to the left.  After a few moments’ silent struggle whether to leave it as it was or not, I yanked it from the wall, carefully re-measured the proper anchor holes, made sure the results were level, carefully drilled, carefully hammered the crappy anchors into the dry wall, hung the shelf, hung some pictures under it, went upstairs.  When I returned the shelf looked askew; the spirit level determined it now listed to the right.  So I tilted the pictures under it to the right, so the shelf won’t look completely crappily hung until I get around to fixing it.

Another accomplishment: finishing the play-through in Mass Effect.  This is one of the few games I’ve enjoyed so thoroughly.  Sure, there are a few rote elements, but the payoff is double-plus good, and the SFnal setting is satisfyingly detailed.

There were a couple of loud-talkers on the bus ride home this evening.  Just before Loud-talker One disembarked around 26th & Belmont, he mentioned to his interlocutor that he owned a house nearby.  Loud-talker Two babbled loudly about what a great neighborhood that was (true).  Number One replied (loudly), “Yeah, but gay as fuck.”

The writer Tim Pratt has posted about his son River’s upcoming surgery.  My thoughts are with them.  How horrible for parents to go through something like this so soon in their child’s life (or ever, obviously).  The odds in this case are good but meanwhile the strain is unimaginable to me.  One weeps at how many parents so often must be so brave for their little ones.

This put me in mind of a book by Dean Koontz — not in a macabre way, and certainly not wishing on River any parallel of that experience, except for any transcendence which may come his way, whether through this or other events.

Overheard on the bus home from work yesterday evening:

“Yo, so it’s just Mexicans you hang out with?”

“mumble mumble mumble.”

“Well, if it’s so unfortunate, whyn’t you quit?”

Plus snippets of information about “when I was in prison” and various X3 gang signs duly noted in someone else’s house.

I am a lousy chess player.  Most likely this is due to discouraging lack of success at beating the easiest levels of various computer chess games, with the ensuing decline of interest in improving my skillz.  My new iPod, however, promises to change this.  Yes, it not only slices and dices and cures halitosis, but it now holds a chess game I downloaded this last weekend.  The lowest level on this game is “Monkey”, and I must say that I have been spanking the monkey ever since Sunday.  Erm.  That is, I can easily and quickly beat the CPU opponent every time.

The next level is “Child”.  I hesitate to advance before I have throughly shamed my simian opponent.  Also I’m sure the Child will beat me and I’m not ready for the resulting despondency to stifle my dreams of chess mastery.

Yesterday morning shuffle chose to cue Django Reinhardt’s “Mystery Pacific”.  I was startled because the previous night the last thing I read before I went to bed was a short story by Alastair Reynolds called “Pacific Mystery”.  Whoa.  I know that there is something about coincidence that is attractive to our brains.  We assume they are powerful because we want them to be meaningful.  That’s why newspaper horoscopes survive. 

One evening years ago I was watching “ER” in the apartment I rented on 18th and Couch in NW, strumming my guitar idly while lolling on my futon.  I started playing the Beatles’ “Blackbird”, and just then a character on the show started singing that same song.  That was so odd that I was telling people about it for days and it took a long time before I had to accept that it portended no stunning change in my life.  You have to work for change, not wait for the auspices, or trust in the Amazing Lattice O’ Coincidence.  That said, one need not berate oneself for what appears to be an evolved reaction.  Instead, quote the lines of Ionesco: “Comme c’est bizarre! Que c’est curieux! et quelle coïncidence!”  Reflect for a moment on the absurdity of life, enjoy serendipity for the arbitrary chance it is, and then move on.

Move on to the important task of noting that the new iPod now holds my entire music collection, which is currently comprised of 9,443 tracks.  Let’s see what the first ten of those tracks are, randomly:

“That Certain Feeling” by George Gershwin

“Mohammed’s Radio” by Warren Zevon

“Freddie’s Dead” by Curtis Mayfield, Superfly

“Skunk” by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Now I Got Worry

“He’s A Whore” by Big Black, Songs About Fucking

“Demolition Dance” by The Ruts, Demolition Dancing

“Tumble Down” by Catherine Wheel, Ferment

“Never Said” by Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville

“Positively” by Cryptic Slaughter, Convicted

“Like A Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited

Last night while walking northwards with the dogs I noticed scattered folks along the west side of the street, gazing past me.  Then I noticed there was the moon and it looked odd.  I hadn’t brought my glasses with me but I did remember just then of the predicted lunar specatular, so although I didn’t see it all that clearly, I did see a total eclipse of the moon.

I was surprised how long it lasted.  I hurried home as the last of the sun’s brightness was fading from the right limb of the moon.  I expected that disturbing redness would have vanished by the time I got back to make sure Mrs The Fyd saw this.  I needn’t have hurried; upon reflection it makes sense that the size of the Earth’s shadow makes for a leisurely transit and so Mrs and I went out on the back deck and gazed upon the darkened face of the moon for awhile.  It looked rather like a dim photo of Mars.

The dogs noticed nothing.  Either they are not primitive enough or else their nous has evolved to trump their nose for phenomena.

The greeting banner on my cell phone announces its name as “Vavatch Hub”.  This is a reference to Iain M. Banks’ Consider Phlebas, which is only one of the greatest SF works of our time.  I also have a download of this image of Galaxy M104.  Looks like an Orbital to me, if I squint right.  One day I brought that image up on my desktop monitor, and then used the camera on my cell to snap a photo.  The ensuing result is blurry and looks as if it depicts the destruction of Vavatch Orbital by Culture gridfire.  Sort of.  To me.  Anyway, that’s the screen saver on my phone.

This may not be seemly behaviour in an adult, but it is what it is.  It is also by way of background to my current dilemma.  I am going to purchase a replacement iPod (the poorly named Classic).  The one I’m replacing has worked without a hitch for a couple of years, but when I purchased it I underestimated the amount of music I had in my collection (at that point very little had been ripped to my computer’s hard drive).  Now I am finally getting an iPod with enough memory to hold my entire library, plus plenty of space for future acquisitions.

So there is no controversy for me in contemplating the purchase.  However, when I bought the first iPod, I took advantage of Apple’s free engraving offer, and on the back the inscription reads: Chiark Hub/Audio Terminal.  Of course.  Another Banks/Culture reference.  The laptop at home containing the music library has its hard drive named Chiark Hub, so obviously the iPod is the terminal of the Hub.  Now, my first instinct is to have the same engraved on the new iPod.  But in reality it is not just an audio player, but also displays video.  I doubt I will use that feature much, but it would be misleading to have inscribed on the player’s body such a limiting description.  So I need to change it; this is too much cogitation spent on a trifle, but I thought the original inscription was really cool and am disappointed in the necessity of change. 

I assume the graphic arts department, as well as at least three layers of the Oregonian’s vaunted editing resources, will be resigning over this map. I’m not talking about the typo in the attribution. I’m referring to the no-longer-existent country just south of Chad.  Even during its existence said country never shared a border with Chad.  Tant pis.

Shuffle just cued up AC/DC’s cover of “Baby Please Don’t Go”, which naturally brings to mind the recent release of their Plug Me In DVD box set.  Just about everything on that is a gem (I have footage of some of the earlier shows from other sources and enjoyed them, but the re-mastering for the box set is so excellent and makes listening an even more enjoyable experience) and a highlight is the performance of that song at a show in Melbourne in 1976.  It is stunning and enough to make one think that the tradeoff of being almost fifty now instead of only forty would be worth having had the chance to see the band live back when Bon Scott was still alive.  The shows I’ve seen with Brian Johnson have been great (including the two shows they played in Portland for the Ballbreaker tour; the second was a generous makeup for the first having taken place during inclement weather and some folks weren’t able to make it to the Rose Garden, so I got to see them twice in a year) but there was something special about that band in the seventies.