A Movie Review by my Niece

Paul / ("Nicole"). Mon, 01 July 2002 23:00

---

Movement on other parts of this site~ Which now that I recall, does have other parts, other...unfinished parts. Well, on my Nieces page we have a review of the movie Monsters inc. Which, she actually wrote for me several months ago, but which has only recently (yesterday) come into my hands. It was on their kitchen counter under a weight of papers and what-not so heavy that that counter's molecular structure was compressed to miniture and it is now used as furniture in their dollhouse. True story.

Spiders are Insane

paul. Sat, 15 Jul 2002 15:30

---

Spiders are insane. They are, the jumping ones I mean. They are completely nuts. I have a number of spiders sharing my apartment with me. I tolerate them, particularly the ones around the periphery. No matter how large they are, or how large they get. They eat the ants; they eat the little bugs that eat my clothes. They earn their keep. After a while I start to recognize some of them as individuals. I do not give them names. The little jumping spiders are curious creatures. Territorial and aggressive beyond all reason they will challenge all intentions on their space. One such octpedal fuzzy pretender has set himself up on my magazine table. A sadly dusty surface with a rarely disturbed chessboard set up on it. The other day while reaching for a book on this table. The spider came tearing out from among the chess pieces a small dot of a thing covered in a handsome coat of fine white brown and black hairs.

In a few hops he placed himself between me and the book and started a series of faints at my fingers. I noted the light layer of soft gray on the cover of the book. It had lain there for a bit, and it was his now. I reached around and took the book away from the other side. "Spider" descended into a paralaxcysm of indignation and hopped madly about this way and that for a moment. Then he settled down on the corner of the chessboard and stared at me for several minutes. He could see me sitting there about two feet from him. If I moved or shifted he would take tiny steps to keep his body and eyes aimed directly at me. This tiny aggrieved creature, one ten thousandth my size, was willing to take me on in the name of that lost part of his world. Spider psyches, I reflected, have much devoted to a sense of what's theirs and very little dedicated (or cross-wired) to adjudging relative sizes.

I was reminded of a similar incident a few months previous I had forgotten. Another jumping spider appeared on my bar of soap which lay in a casement window sill while I was taking a shower. I went to pick up the soap expecting this spider would hop off and return to what ever dark corner it came from. It did not and reared up on its back four legs and waved its front legs at me in a distinctly threatening fashion. I could see its little mouth parts moving. I took another bar of soap from the sink and left the spider to its own devices, marching back and forth across the edge of the soap. Presently as the air steamed up and all surfaces grew moister I could see a faint bit of lather build up around the spiders legs. Gradually, as the spider never stopped moving and reacting to my movements, this built up to a film that engulfed its whole body. I watched this and noted that air does not move through a soap film. If this spider needs air this will not play out well for it. At that point a notion of this sort must have come to the spider which began a number of hops straight up into the air, a little higher each time. These did nothing to dislodge the film from around its body. On the final hop it jumped clear of the bar of soap altogether and landed on its back with its legs extended in the air. I poked it with my finger. It was quite rigid and never moved again.

Sweepers Sweepers man your brooms...

Paul. Mon, 6 May 2002 23:00

---

NBC ran a show last Wednesday (17 April 02) a slice-of-life piece on the military. Particularly life aboard the Aircraft Carrier John C. Stennis CV 74. It seems to me every five to ten years somebody runs a piece like this - one of the networks, Frontline, Nova, somebody - and I usually watch it. I watch because I lived on one of those things once. It was home for the better part of a year. This time around: though I found it hard to watch. I was surprised by the discomfort I felt and the difficulty I had giving myself to the show. Too many things had changed. Too many things were being remembered, rather than reinforced or causally recollected. It has been a long time, and my life on the ship belongs to a past era by any way of reckoning.
My ship was the USS Ranger. It's being cut up now I believe. Built in 1954 it didnÕt even make it to its fiftieth birthday. The Forrestals' are gone, all of them: Forrestal, Saratoga, Ranger, and Independence. The Stennis is not only some twenty percent bigger with more planes and more bombs, but all the fuels tanks of the nuclear-powered Stennis carry jet-fuel. Oil-burners such as the Ranger could spare the jets less than half it's fuel tanks. In truth the Stennis is probably twice the ship the Forrestals were. I remember seeing four Carriers in a row at North Island (San Diego) once, all veterans of the Vietnam war and past at least one refit. They all looked equally enormous from were I stood. I couldnÕt conceive of anything bigger. Now tin shears and acetylene torches eat away the real matter of a memory.

The way people live aboard those things has changed too. Not so much that all recognition is gone; Everyone still seems to sleep in "Northampton Racks." This is a foot locker with a mattress on the lid, some curtains and a small fluorescent light, stacked three or four high. They are the only space on a ship that is truly yours. There is still the One-MC, the Shipwide intercom. Still, the cycle of bells, one through eight four times a day. There is still setting the ships material condition at dusk. Still Alert 15's, Firepartys etc. Naval vessels impose themselves on their inhabitants thoroughly, without apology and the template varies only slowly. Brokow stuck his head in the division which had been my old unit. The place was bulkhead to bulkhead PC's half of them connected to the internet. We had a water cooled Univac and a punch card loader to program it. A minor difference. Women; though, there were no women on the Ranger. Not while underway at least. Four week, six week, at sea periods, no women. We checked, we asked-specifically, they answered, they said no, apparently there were rules. Those rules have changed. This difference was the hardest to get a feel for. The tremendous artifiality of living and working without women around was never lost on us at the time. It marked the break and exceptionalness of military life for us. It underscored the age and weight of accumulated culture -subculture really. That weight came down upon us and molded us - I can only really speak for myself - to its imprint. Even then women were serving aboard the noncombatants. I remember, during an picnic outing for our task force to Grandee Island (a very lovely little island that sits in the entrance to Subic Bay in the Phillipines), watching some boys and girls together from our assigned oil tanker take hold of their Captain carry him down the beach and toss him in the surf. "This is so very different from the ship we serve on," I observed to my friend Mark (IS3 Edmunds), gesturing towards them with a bottle of San Miguel. "Yes," he replied nodding, "yes it is."

Writing!

Paul. Wed, 10 April 2002 23:30

---

Writing is generally the last thing I want to do. Its too introspective an undertaking and it takes up too much time, requires too much effort and focus. So I've been casting about for an approach and motivation that speaks to a point of order without a big penalty of energy. Because, after all, there is TV to watch, and hot dogs to microwave. Macaroni and cheese doesn't make itself. I find rambling pointlessly works for me- gets a lot on paper with hardly any cognitive damage at all. Motivation must be pried out of the embedded portions of the day. I was looking at a page in my local paper the other day (02 April). The "Kid's Post" it calls itself. Its the back page of the Washington Posts Style section. The topic of the day was kids and their pets. Some kids got to write little stories, and their pets got their photos in the paper. One youngster held onto her pet and so got herself in the picture. I could use a kid like that as my agent I thought. It's not as though I've ever had anything published in the Post. Sigh, I don't suppose I'd get a reduced rate being her uncle and all.

Writing.
I think it helps if you don't yourself too seriously. Maybe serious helps some folk, I don't know. It puts me in mind of that old Jon Lovitz sketch: ACTING! Writing! behold. Watch how its done. Look up, its the sky. Over there - the horizon. These could be, umm, metaphors, conceivably. Or how about this: blue. Note how suddenly you were put in mind of color maybe even color shaded blue. How is this done, you cry. The answer: writing. Now this. Green. Yes green. Mercy, its just like being in Fenway Park in June it is . By what means is the thing accomplished, you demand dumbfounded. Technology? A certain sympathetic magic? Ancient Ionian Mystery Ceremony? Mirrors perhaps? No not at all. Simply I. I alone. Twas writing is all, that spoke for the lot. Writing!

Hey is this thing still turned on?

Paul. Tue, 09 April 2002 01:04

---

Well perhaps a little more time has gone by since the last I wrote anything here than I would have liked. Can't trace all the things that might account for that. Wrong background music perhaps. Or an unhelpful habit of continually getting up on the wrong side of the bed. A crumb, unseen not understood, laying across the path larger than any new england glacial-strewn boulder. Only one part in ten broaching the surface; like an iceberg, or a camels nose under the tent flap. Still, a number of things have gotten written in draft or sketched out, at least, in simple text or bare bones edit.

These things were supposed to end up here, but elsewhere also. The elsewhere in question is an as yet nascent Web 'zine being put together by friends. Its intrinsic being tied to a Content Management System - also perched on the edge of being and not yet being. The CMS is to be a commerical product the sales from which will render money they will use to feed their darling innocent child. The 'zine in being will be a house project, a manafestation and a showcase of the CM system. With this in mind, I turned my attention from shorts asides (like this) to several article length notions. Deliberately leaving them unfinished until it was time for them to be on their way so I could send them off reletively fresh and not worked and reworked until there was little left but dry worried dust.

So I balanced these things upon my nose like a midget performing bear in the outer ring of a three ring circus and could think of no way of getting back to my own neglected web page, shabby in its static non dynamicness. (I could throw in some javascripting, you know, just for the heck of it.) When my Niece (age 9) recently mentioned that she could possibly supply me with a review of "Ice Age." I was shamed again into scribbling incomprehensible notes on little tiny pieces of paper. Which, jammed into various pockets, exist not so much as reminders of some point of inspiration as they do a mojo of sorts.

Something new

Paul. Mon, 8 Apr 2002 20:30

---

Replacing the nested tables with CSS elements, can't remember why I didn't do this before. musta been a reason.