Happy Halloween everybody! I know most people will be reading this a day or two after Halloween, but, if you did not get a good scare on Halloween, you haven't missed your chance. I saw this on Andrew Sullivan's blog, and I'm going to copy his introduction verbatim below. I URGE you to follow all of the rules.

"This is a scary video. Do not click on it if you are squeamish, especially if you are at work (and I know you are). Put down coffee, drinks, or anything else, for that matter. Click at your own risk. And Happy Halloween. Just watch the car closely and see what special effects can do."

Posted at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

I think that Veronica Mars is the best show on network television and basic cable. First of all, for those who have never seen Veronica Mars, here's a basic synopsis of what it's about. A high-school/college age girl name Veronica is following in the footsteps of her father who was a sheriff and is now a private investigator by solving crimes and righting misdeeds. Although that synopsis makes it sound like the show has a distinct Nancy Drew-like quality to it, in fact, there is a lot more to the show than that simple description suggests. First of all, the town where Veronica and her father lives, Neptune, California, is a seething hotbed of class warfare. The rich kids, known as the 09ers (pronounced oh-niners), because of their zipcode, take every opportunity to assert their superiority over the poorer kids at Neptune High School. While the poor kids don't have a particular nickname, there is a biker gang known as the PCHs (whose name comes from the Pacific Coast Highway). Veronica is somewhere in between all of these social circles. Both of her boyfriends over the course of the series have been 09ers, she has been on-again/off-again friends with the leader of the PCHers, Weevil, and her father was disgracefully fired as sheriff of Neptune, which places her socially and economically among the poor kids. The show doesn't treat the class tensions simplistically, however. It's not a case of rich snooty kids picking on helpless poor kids. What it feels most like is a Greek tragedy. Class and money are not just class and money, they are an extension of fate. Neither is it a question of morality. Rich is not evil and poor is not virtuous. Long-ago wrongs done by the characters and their families flow like ocean currents through the present time, continually pushing people and lives in ways which feel almost uncontrollable. There is a movie director whose work I have an affection for. His name is Todd Solondz, and the last movie he made, in 2004, was Palindromes. There is a quote from Palindromes that applies to the inescapability of one's own nature that I'm talking about:

"People always end up the way they started out. No one ever changes. They think they do but they don't. If you're the depressed type now that's the way you'll always be. If you're the mindless happy type now, that's the way you'll be when you grow up. You might lose some weight, your face may clear up, get a body tan, breast enlargement, a sex change, it makes no difference. Essentially, from in front, from behind. Whether you're 13 or 50, you will always be the same."

This inevitably of fate also shows up in the circular nature of the storylines. While cases and crimes get solved, they're never quite over. Always, there is some aspect of a past case coming back to impact a new case. The unknown person who raped Veronica in Season 1 revealed himself in the Season 2 finale and tried to kill Veronica's father. This season, Veronica is working on trying to catch a rapist on her college campus. The murderer of her best friend was caught in the Season 1 finale but was acquitted and returned in Season 2. He was murdered, but Veronica is now dating his son, Logan, who is worried that murder in his genes. Veronica herself seems destined to repeat the same patterns forever. She tried to leave Neptune behind forever and get a scholarship to Stanford, but an 09er used money and influence to get the scholarship instead, so now Veronica goes to the local state college in Neptune. At the start of the series, Veronica and Logan despised each other. They later started dating, but they broke up again in Season 2 and despised each other again. Now, in Season 3, they are a couple once again. Like the characters of Greek tragedy, you feel these people can and deserve to escape their past selves and their troubled family history. They deserve a better future, and you can see how it can happen for them. Just make a few good choices, avoid bad situations, a better life seems within reach. But always, somehow, the fates intervene, and when you look back, it all seems inevitable in retrospect. Of course it was going to happen that way because that is the nature of these characters, the nature of the society in which they live, the nature of the people around them. If it were our own lives, it would be terribly depressing I suppose, but on television, it's powerful. Another genre besides Greek tragedy that Veronica Mars tries to embrace is noir. Here is an attempt by French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton to define noir: "We'd be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric [dreamlike], strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel...." So far, each of the season-long mysteries on Veronica Mars have had all of these qualities. They are twisted-up morasses of sex, wrath, child abuse, deeply antisocial behavior. There are shadows everywhere, and you (the viewer, and Veronica) end up assuming the worst of everyone around you before finding the true criminal. Maybe from my description it sounds like watching Veronica Mars is an experience which varies from tortuous depression to raging despair. In fact, the show itself is kind of bouncy and chirpy on the surface. Veronica likes to be sarcastic and jokey, and the people she spends the most time with tend to share that demeanor. It's only when you've watched several episodes that you realize the deeper resonances of the show. By then you're hooked.

Posted at 12:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

As I have been doing for the past few Saturdays, I went to the movies today. I went to see Catch a Fire, which is set in South Africa in 1980, during the era of apartheid. The movie is about a follow-the-rules black foreman at the Secunda oil refinery who becomes disenchanted after being arrested and tortured when he is (wrongly) suspected of colluding in an attack on the refinery and joins the African National Congress rebel army. It is based on the real-life story of Patrick Chamusso. I actually wasn't very enthusiastic about seeing this movie and was wavering back and forth about whether I wanted to see Catch a Fire or the new Martin Scorsese movie (I can't remember the name of it), but I decided that there's a good chance that Catch a Fire won't be around for very long whereas the Martin Scorsese movie is sure to have a long first run, and then will be re-released at Academy Awards time because it will probably be nominated for a few Oscars. Anyway, I wasn't expecting to like Catch a Fire because I expected it to be pretty heavy-handed with its message. Yeah apartheid was bad, yeah it was a shameful time in world history, yeah it made otherwise decent men turn into rebels and terrorists and killers; all good messages, but I don't go to the movies to be taught worthwhile messages, or at least that's not the main reason I go to the movies. It turns out though that the movie was not nearly as heavy-handed as I thought it was going to be; it was in fact quite entertaining. For one thing, it's packed with music, really great music. It's ironic that the songs, mostly sung in Afrikaans I believe, sound bouncy and joyful, but when you read the subtitles you see they have lyrics like "We will use our AK-47s to kill the Boers dead, yes we will shoot them dead..." Boer, by the way, is the term that the black South Africans use when they refer to white South Africans, which I didn't know. But the movie overflows with this music, and it is great. There's even some disco in a wedding scene at the very beginning, which is appropriate for a movie set in 1980. The other thing about the movie is that it isn't heavy-handed, I didn't feel, but I realized at the end of the movie that I was rooting for the terrorist (Patrick Chamusso) to blow up the oil refinery before the police could stop him. His terrorist act is somewhat mediated by the fact that, through a diversion ploy, everyone has evacuated the refinery before the bomb is planted, but it is an act of terrorism nonetheless. And in our day and age, it's a little disquieting to find yourself rooting for the terrorists, but in that time and place, the terrorists, the members of the African National Congress, were the "good guys". Another thing to add to the moral confusion - the oil refinery featured in the movie, the Secunda refinery, was pivotal in developing the technology for turning coal into oil. This technology is one of the things being touted nowadays as a key to breaking our reliance on Middle East oil, and the reason the technology was developed was that two isolated regimes, first the Nazis and then apartheid South Africa, needed a way to get oil when other countries were not willing or were not allowed to export to them. I know so much about this because I just read an article about it on Monday. I had no idea it would have anything to do with the movie, and the movie doesn't go too much into the technology behind the Secunda refinery, but it is a neat coinkydink.

Posted at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (36) | TrackBacks (0)

Not only did the predicted blizzard come into Colorado, and not only did I get the morning off of work, but there is a foot of snow on the ground here and the whole Air Force Academy is closed for the day. There is a CNN reporter in the Springs, I just saw him on TV... Now, I know what you're probably thinking - there's dangerous blizzard conditions out there, it's cold, winds are blowing at 25 mph, it seems like a great time for an outdoor stroll. What, you're not thinking that? Because you have a brain which contains an ounce of common sense? Well, Mr./Ms. Smug who is too smart to go walking around in a blizzard, let me tell you what I did. So I figured, I'll just walk around my apartment complex and take a few pictures and see what the weather is really like. Maybe build a snowman if the mood strikes me. I don't change out of my sweatpants or my "Beer!!! Give your brain the night off!" T-shirt that I slept in. I put on my Rolling Stone baseball cap, a light corduroy jacket (I have yet to get a winter coat), and my hiking boots and walk out my door, locking it behind me. I LOCK THE DOOR BEHIND ME, pay attention to that, it's going to be important later. I should also mention that it's 8:30 in the morning when I do this, and there is a foot of snow on the ground and 20+ mph winds, so everybody else in the apartment complex is inside or asleep. I stumble through the deep snow, barely able to see because oh by the way I have my glasses on, which are by now fogged up and covered with snow. I decide to walk out to the small park behind the complex, figuring that might provide a nice picture of a snowy landscape. But there's a small slope you have to walk up to get from the apartments to the park, and on my first step up the incline, look out, I slip and end up face-down in the snow. I have my camera in my coat pocket, which is very loose, so the snow is now all up in the pocket and all up in the camera. I do my best to dry off the camera, finally get up into the park, but the snowfall is so heavy that you can't see a damn thing past 10 feet. I take one picture of a tree and turn around. On my way back into the apartment complex, I decide to take a picture of the snow-covered cars in the parking lot. So, I pull my camera out of my pocket, and, because it is still wet from the snow, it slips out of my hand and onto the snow-covered pavement of the parking lot. Damn damn damn. But amazingly, the poor, beaten-up camera still works. I take a couple more pictures and head back to my apartment. But then, when I reach into my other coat pocket, the one not containing the camera, I realize that my apartment key is gone. It fell out! Probably when I slipped going into the park, but who knows? The pocket is loose enough that the key could have fell out when I bent down to get my camera, or I might have even have knocked it out just from walking around. So, I, with my snow-covered glasses and my shivering body, try my best to retrace my steps and see if I can find the key. Did I also mention that the key is loose (not on a key ring). So, yes, I am searching through the snow for a single key. Also, the snow is still falling fairly heavily, so I have maybe 5-10 minutes before everything gets covered up by the newly fallen snow. This is of course assuming that the key is laying on the surface of the snow, and hadn't penetrated below the surface of the 12-inch-deep snow. The whole time I'm looking, I'm thinking, ok, you don't really know your neighbors that well and you've barely even said hi to them, but you've just got to bite the bullet and knock on their door and say, I'm sorry, I lost my key, and I need to either stay with you today or freeze to death outside. Or, I think, maybe I could walk to a Starbucks or a McDonalds, which might be open, and hang out there all day. The most obvious place for where I lost my key was where I slipped and fell down, but I dig through every damn inch of snow on that hill, and no damn key. I retrace my steps once. I retrace my steps twice. I dig through every damn inch of snow on the hill again. No damn key. So, I finally decide to knock on my neighbor's door. At 8:30 in the morning. With a blizzard blowing outside. To tell them I'm locked out of my apartment. And then a miracle happens. I see someone walk into the main office of the apartment complex. The office is supposed to be open at 9 AM on weekdays, but I assumed that they'd be closed, just like practically every other business in the Springs. But those wonderful wonderful apartment workers came in, on time, just like any other workday. I went in and said bless you kind wonderful apartment manager, I need a key to my apartment. And, she gave me the spare key and I got into my apartment. So, here I am, now, writing this post from my warm apartment, still wearing the same sweatpants and "Beer!!! Give your brain the night off!" T-shirt. Very soon, I'll be eating Froot Loops and then taking a shower and forgetting this horrible experience ever happened. So, the moral of the story is: Don't go walking around in a blizzard with loose keys, loose camera, Rolling Stone ballcap, "Beer!!! Give your brain the night off!" T-shirt, and sweatpants.

Posted at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (77) | TrackBacks (0)

They say a blizzard is going to be hitting Colorado tomorrow, so I'm planning on skipping out of work, at least for the morning. With that in mind, I'm staying up until midnight(!!!) tonight. I'm a night owl, but I've had to force myself to go to sleep at 10 so that I can make it through the work week without turning into a zombie. Of course, if the blizzard misses us or holds off until later in the day tomorrow, I'll be kinda screwed, but that's a chance I'm willing to take.

Posted at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (319) | TrackBacks (0)

So a couple weeks ago I mentioned that I was planning on writing a "longish" post about how Veronica Mars is the best show on network TV and basic cable. Well, the weekend after I made that promise I put off writing the post for a little while, and I put it off for a little while longer, and then, bam, the weekend was over. And then, that Tuesday, I watched the new episode of Veronica Mars, and it, uh, kinda sucked. Here's Television Without Pity's assessment: "I don't think it's being overly harsh to say that this was not one of this show's stronger or more exciting episodes. The writing was oddly flat, in the first place, and the attention to detail was subpar as well." There's another episode on tonight, in ten minutes, in fact, so let's hope this one's better. If it is, then maybe, possibly, if the stars align and my dilly-dallying weekend ways cease, I could write a longish post about how Veronica Mars is the best show on network TV and basic cable.

Posted at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (568) | TrackBacks (0)

I went to see Little Miss Sunshine at Kimball's Twin Peak Theater yesterday. It was alright. It's about a dysfunctional family's 1200-mile trip to enter the youngest member, Olive, in the Little Miss Sunshine child beauty pageant in California. The movie is basically an indie version of National Lampoon's Vacation, which is good and bad. It's good in that it's a funny, quirky movie, but it's bad in that pretty much everything is a setup for funniness or quirkiness or quirky funniness or funny quirkiness... I did like the ending; it's nice and heartwarming and humorously plays off the creepiness of child beauty pageants.

Posted at 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So here I am, writing my first dispatch from Antarctica. Haha, no I didn't really run away to Antarctica, as I said in my last post I might do. The talk went fairly well. Actually, the colonel and lieutenant colonel seemed to be pretty bored, which isn't a great thing, but it meant that they weren't jumping on my every sentence asking sharp questions. After my talk was over, they asked about where my funding came from, which my boss, who was also there, answered. And they asked a couple simple questions about some of my numbers and one question about terminology I had used (width vs. depth). So it looks like Antarctica will be deprived of my presence for a little while longer.

Posted at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (616) | TrackBacks (0)

Oh man, I have to give a talk tomorrow about my research to the head of the physics department, who is a full colonel, and the deputy head of the department, who is a lieutenant colonel. I am not looking forward to it at all. I should be used to public speaking by now; I've acted in a dozen plays, give or take, and I taught labs and homework tutorials at Rice for six years. But giving a talk about my research is different. With acting, you have a script, and as long as you remember your lines and where you're supposed to be on stage, you're pretty much OK. When I teach, I always make sure that I'm fully prepared, and by my fourth or fifth year of teaching, most of the material was stuff that I had covered ten times before. So, I know there won't be any unpleasant surprises. But talking about current, ongoing research opens you up to all kinds of challenging and hard-to-answer questions. I should also mention that the colonel and lieutenant colonel both have Ph.D.s in physics, so it's not like they won't know enough to ask me questions. It'll be the middle of my talk, and the colonel will stand up and say, "Excuse me, but have you taken account of the Khlkwavaskeyr Theory?" And I'll reply, "Whositwhatsit?" And he'll say, "Khlkwavaskeyr Theory is something that is taught in every freshman physics class. Consideration of this simple theory will make all of your research objectives moot." And then I'll start crying and run out of the room and then move to Antarctica so that I'll never have to face them ever again. As you can see, I'm kind of taking a glass-is-half-empty approach to this meeting. But I've practiced my talk more than ten times now, and I feel like I know my stuff pretty well, though I do tend to get flustered when I'm answering questions, but I think I'm prepared, so we'll see how it goes.

Posted at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, I wrote with excitement about the first snowfall of the season. I guess I should have thought a little more about what was coming. This evening, when I walked out of the lab, I saw not just a light dusting of snow but 3 inches laying on the ground. Even though I spent half a winter here last year (not to mention 22 years in Pittsburgh), I'm still pretty nervous about driving in the snow. I made it home just fine, but all the same I wish the snowfall would have held off until late tonight, which is when it was supposed to come.

Posted at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (732) | TrackBacks (0)

I got a postcard from my brother this weekend. He sent it from Kennebunkport, Maine, where he and Leanne are on their honeymoon (actually, I think they're home from their honeymoon now, but anyway). The Bush family I guess has a home in Kennebunkport (I said it was where the Kennedy family lives, but, duh, obviously the Kennedy compound is somewhere in Massachusetts, maybe in Martha's Vineyard?). Leanne's dad told her that if she saw President Bush around town to make sure she told him he was doing a great job, but Leanne said nope, she wasn't going to be doing that. There was nothing in the postcard, however, about them meeting George W., and they also didn't write what my friend Becky used to write on her postcards: "The weather is here, wish you were beautiful." Joe did say they were having a good time and that Kennebunkport is very picturesque, so that's good to hear.

Posted at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1063) | TrackBacks (0)

I went to see Michel Gondry's Science of Sleep at Kimball's Twin Peak Theater today, and I absolutely loved it. I wasn't expecting to like it; I hadn't liked Gondry's last movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and this movie seemed like it was going to suffer from the same wannabe artsiness as Eternal Sunshine. What Science of Sleep is, though, is almost a redo of Eternal Sunshine, but this time with actual human characters living actual human lives and dealing with actual human problems. Stephane is the protagonist of Science of Sleep. He lives in his imagination and has trouble separating dreamworld from reality. He falls in love with his neighbor Stephanie, who is not only one of the only people in the world who seems to understand his idiosyncrasies, she is also one of the only people in the world who shares in Stephane's idiosyncrasies. But they are never able to get together. The things that make them unique and special to each other ruin their attempts at finding love with each other. Stephane, in particular, can't keep his imagination from not only creating a romance out of nothing, but also questioning and undermining and breaking apart said romance. The story is cute and romantic, but it is also heartrending and tragic. I'm glad I finally got around to getting off my couch and going to see it.

Posted at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1081) | TrackBacks (0)

I want to write a longish post about why I think Veronica Mars is the best show on network TV and basic cable (I don't get HBO, but I always hear good things about The Wire and the now-ended Sopranos and Six Feet Under). Because of time constraints, I think the longer post will have to wait until this weekend, but let me just point out one of the things I love about Veronica Mars. It pays attention to the little stuff. For example, this past week's show had Veronica going undercover for the college newspaper as a sorority pledge. The opening-day pledge event was heavy in stereotypical 50s kitsch, with all the pledges wearing floral print dresses and the sorority mother talking about how much she loves "her girls". In keeping with that motif, when Veronica entered the sorority house, a line of sisters stood facing her from the entrance steps. They immediately burst into a cappella singing. "You with the sa-aad eyes," they started, and I unabashedly admit that I began freaking out, because that is the first line of one of the all-time best songs ever made, Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors". Veronica rolled her eyes and walked away, because I guess the chorus group was supposed to be groaningly cheesy, but I was disappointed because I wanted to hear the rest of the song. My basic point, though, is that no other TV show I can think of would do something like this. It's a 5-second throwaway moment, but there is so much of interest in it. It tells you about the sorority and about Veronica, through her reaction, and it's just a fun little moment in itself. Anyway, here is the Cyndi Lauper version of "True Colors":

Posted at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

Here is what it looked like outside when I woke up this morning. It was the first snow of the winter, or at least the first snow that laid on the ground. It all melted by this afternoon, but it's supposed to stay cold for most of the rest of the week. I don't mind it too much; it's actually a little refreshing. I like to try to sleep through the night with the heater turned off, but I always wake up at around 4 A.M. shivering... Like I've mentioned before, I'm not interested in getting into a relationship, but if I ever did, one of the big things I would look forward to would be getting into thermostat wars. I would totally walk around the house in my underwear cooling myself off with a bag of frozen peas and screaming "Did you turn that damn thing up to 90?!?!? One of us is going to have to sell a kidney to pay the heating bill, and it ain't gonna be me!" I should write a relationship advice book.

Posted at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (615) | TrackBacks (0)

You might get the impression from reading this diary that I lead a pretty exciting life. I'm climbing mountains, flying to Buffalo, going to weddings, reading books, uh, getting sick... The truth is that most of the time when I have free time, I do absolutely nothing. By doing nothing, I mean that I sit at home all day watching TV and taking lots of naps. Part of the reason for that is that I'm still getting exhausted from my work schedule, which forces me to wake up about two hours earlier than my body would like. The other reason is that I'm just naturally very lazy, and I have to fight my lazy nature to force myself to do all of the exciting stuff that I do. Now that mountain-climbing season is over for me, I've thought about trying to fill my weekends with something other than endless napping and TV-watching sessions. Something I'm thinking about doing is starting to go to the movies regularly again. I used to go to movies all the time. I even got into a routine in grad school where every Saturday I would go see a newly-released movie in the early afternoon and then rent two movies and watch those in the afternoon into the evening. By the time I started writing my thesis, though, I'd gotten bored with movies and was anyway in such a time crunch that I really didn't have time for them anyway. Since then, I've never really gotten back into going to the movies, but now I'm thinking about starting up again. When I climbed Pikes Peak a couple weekends ago, Iyad, the guy who I climbed with, told me about Kimball's Twin Peak Theater in downtown Colorado Springs, which shows independent movies, which are the kind of movies I prefer seeing. I was going to go on Saturday to see Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, but I fell asleep on Saturday afternoon and slept through the showings I was going to see. See, I told you I was naturally lazy. Hopefully I'll make it next weekend. But when I started thinking about going to the movies, I went back and checked out my old website, The Irregulars. I set it up a couple years ago and, like this site, I wrote all the code for it. It had a blog, movie reviews, book reviews (well, only one book review), and, embarassingly, a comic strip. I say embarassingly because I have no drawing ability whatsoever, though I tried to play off of that by drawing the characters as just very basic shapes - a square, a triangle, an oval. Anyway, it took way too much time, so I stopped keeping up with it after three weeks or so. But looking back at the movie reviews I did for the site, I'm very impressed. I haven't read them since I posted them two-and-a-half years ago. Unlike these diary entries, the movie reviews and other content on The Irregulars was heavily edited (by me), and my writing is vastly improved by several rounds of editing. By the way, the name of the site is based on the Baker Street Irregulars, who are characters from Sherlock Holmes stories. They are a group of children, London street urchins, whom Holmes would employ to sneak around and find out the secrets of the criminals who inhabited the city's underworld. If I ever did manage to set up my comments section, I was going to comment under the name of "Wiggins", who is the leader of the Baker Street Irregulars. Anyway, I'm still holding on to the site, and maybe someday, probably when I retire, I'll get around to resucitating it. Hopefully I won't have lost what little drawing ability I have before then.

Posted at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (33) | TrackBacks (0)

The picture above is Joe, my brother, and his best man Neil. I should mention that I left my camera in the car during the ceremony, so I don't have any pictures of Beamish the Dog in her bridesmaid's outfit or of Leanne in her wedding gown. Speaking of Leanne, her marriage to my brother means that I am no longer the only "Dr. Kontur" in our family. Leanne has a doctorate in pharmacy (though you'd hardly know it from reading my diary entries, I have a Ph.D. in physics). In fact, before the wedding, I think I may have been the only Dr. Kontur in the U.S. But, as far as the pictures go, my sister told me that the wedding photographers will be posting the pictures somewhere on their website; but I don't know what their web address is. When Joe and Leanne get back from their honeymoon, I'll ask them about it. Getting back to the ceremony, though, they set up a tent outside the main winery building for the wedding reception. The building itself was crowded with wine tourists; I guess it's harvest season or wine-making season or something like that which is a big deal for wine enthusiasts. Anyway, the ceremony was not in the tent; it was outside. Unfortunately, the day was gray and very chilly. When I first flew in to Buffalo on Thursday, it was raining cats and dogs. I had a 100+ mile drive from Buffalo, so I tried to take solace in the fact that I would either drive out of the storm or that it would lose strength before too long. Wishful thinking on my part, the rain got worse to the point of being a epic deluge by the time I got to my hotel. However, the storms cleared out and it was sunny on Friday, so we were hoping for a nice day for the wedding on Saturday. Unfortunately, Mother Nature did not oblige. I felt really bad for the bridesmaids who, aside from Beamish, were wearing sleeveless dresses. Us groomsmen in our tuxes were nice and warm. Luckily for the shivering bridesmaids, the ceremony was quick, only about 15 minutes, and then everybody got to run into the heated tent for the reception. Well, everyone except for the bridal party. We had to run around getting our pictures taken for what seemed like hours. But we eventually did get to go to the reception. By the way, do you remember how I mentioned in my post before I left that Atlantic Starr's "Always" has been played at every wedding since the beginning of time? Well Joe's wedding DJ insisted that he hardly ever plays it. He says that he likes to pick "unique" songs for each wedding. Whatever. It's not like he's playing GWAR, N.W.A., or John Zorn at weddings. You're basically going to be hearing the same shit at every wedding, and I stand by the fact that you will hear Atlantic Starr's "Always" at all weddings. And I was not proven wrong. "Always" was one of the songs played during the dollar dance. I don't know if the DJ played it just to humor me, or if he was going to play it anyway, but, regardless, it was played. Hee, the first song played during the dollar dance was Barenaked Ladies' "If I Had a Million Dollars" which was not only quite apropos, but also happens to me one of my favorite songs ever. It's right up there with "Life in a Nutshell" by... Barenaked Ladies. It may appear that I am a Barenaked Ladies fan, but actually those are the only two of their songs that I ever listen to, but I do LOVE those songs. Anywho, back to the wedding. So, another cool thing was that a lot of people from our family came from far and wide to be at the wedding. My brother and I grew up in Pennsylvania, and most of our relatives live in Pennsylvania. So even for the Pennsylvania relatives, it was a long trip to New York. But my Aunt Evie lives in Florida, and she made it to the wedding, and my Aunt Virginia, who lives in Indiana, made it as well. It was the first time I've seen Aunt Virginia in what must have been ten years, so that was pretty great. Also, she reads my website regularly, and she couldn't stop telling me how much she and her son Jimmy love it and she urged me to keep on posting. I had no choice but to agree with her 100%. Yeah right. I happen to think I'm far from the most interesting thing to read on the interwebs, but I'm narcissistic enough to happily continue to air out my life's trivialities for public viewing. Anyway, I and my family and Leanne's family and Joe's and Leanne's friends enjoyed wine and champagne at the reception, but nobody did the drunk Seahorse dance as far as I could tell. My nephew Carter did keep on stealing my cane and running out on the dance floor swinging it perilously, but nobody got kneecapped or hit in the groin, although there were some close calls. In addition to having wedding photographers, they also had a wedding videographer, who somehow managed to catch me for an interview at the end of the reception, as I was falling asleep. I think I murmured something about how it was a beautiful ceremony and Joe and Leanne are perfect together, and then I think I apologized for hiding Joe in a clothes basket when he was a little baby. That's a legendary story in my family. My mom was screaming "Where's the baby???", and my sister and I were like, "I don't know, not in the laundry basket..." Actually, the ironic thing about my half-asleep mumbling interview is that Joe and Leanne had an actual TV news reporter at their wedding. Their neighbor, Jenny Chu, is a reporter for the CBS affiliate in Rochester. She did the bride's and bridesmaids' makeup for the wedding. I talked to her husband, who is a math teacher, before the ceremony. Anyway, if she had been giving the interview, I'm sure she could have woken me up and made it much more interesting. She could have grilled me: "Did you or did you not ditch your brother in June of 1985 by telling him that your mom had a giant marshmallow in the house for him, but that it would get spoiled if he didn't run in and eat it immediately?" Me: "Um, I don't recall..." Jenny: "Do you want me to bring up the laundry basket! Now give me the truth about the marshmallow!!!!"... Well, all in all, through rain and cold and bad interviews, it turned out to be a fun time and a wonderful wedding, and Joe and Leanne certainly deserved a wonderful wedding.

Posted at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (742) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm back from my brother's wedding. The pictures above show me (on the left) and my nephew Carter (who doesn't like having his picture taken) trying out the top hat and cane. Please don't tell me who looks better; my ego can't bear to hear that my 6-year-old nephew is already cooler than me. I've been trying to think about what to write about the wedding. It's hard for me, the whole thing went by like a blur, a fun wonderful blur, but a blur all the same. What keeps coming back to me are two short conversations I had as I was leaving the wedding. The first was with my mom's boyfriend, Virgil. He said that he's been to a lot of weddings and been in a lot of relationships himself, and that he's never seen a relationship or a wedding where things were as right as they are for Joey and Leanne. I never thought about it that way, but that is so true. Virgil said that even if you think people in a relationship or people getting married are good together, you always feel a little reservation about the couple or at least notice some minor imperfection. But Joey and Leanne, separately, are the two nicest, kindest people I've ever known, and when they're together their effortless friendship and romance towards each other is obvious. The other conversation I keep thinking of was with Leanne's grandma, who everyone calls "Nonny". Nonny is Italian and very, uh, outspoken. I was saying goodbye to Leanne when Nonny walked up to us. She said to me, "I know where Carter, that bratty nephew of yours, got his behavior." And Leanne said "What?!?" since, even for outspoken Italian grandmas, calling someone's nephew a brat is out of bounds. But then Nonny explained what she meant - that me and my mom and Carter were maniacs on the dance floor all night. Which was true, my mom is an awesome dancer, and I'm pretty darn good myself, if I do say so. And Carter, before the wedding began, Carter and me had a "dance-off". And he did this dance where he started out breakdancing, and then he jumped up, and did a spin while tap-dancing. He was great; not just in the "oh that little kid dancing is so cute" way, but in a "he's better than 90% of the dancers I've seen in clubs" kind of way. I tried to mimic his dance, but I couldn't do the tap-dance with any decent rhythm. Nonny also said that when she met me the night before, at the rehearsal dinner, and she heard I was a physicist and worked in research, that she thought I would be quiet and shy. But then she saw me at the wedding and out there dancing, and I wasn't quiet and shy at all. "Goes to show you," she told me, "still waters run deep." That made me feel really good, because sometimes I feel like an extreme introvert, so it was nice that she picked up on another side of me. Before I go talking up my dancing ability too much, I should also mention that when the DJ started playing the "Electric Slide", he was force to stop it in the middle of the song because, according to him, the dance floor was a "train wreck". Heh. And I was a major player in the train wreck. When the song began, I went around asking everyone, "Do you start off moving left or right?" I never did find out, and things just went downhill from there. The DJ finally got a guy from Leanne's family who was reasonably competent (unlike the rest of us) to lead the dance. Unfortunately, I was at the back of the dance floor, which meant that for half the dance, when everyone turned around, I was the leader. Luckily, I managed to remember enough to keep everyone moving in the correct direction, more or less. The thing is, back when I really knew how to do the Electric Slide, I would take the three steps to the right, three steps to the left, three steps back, so on and so forth, and the whole time, while doing the steps, I would also be doing all kinds of funky dance moves. This time, I couldn't even do the three steps. It was basically shuffle some random distance to the right until it seems like it's time to change direction, and then shuffle some random distance to the left. It makes me wonder if I was ever any good at the Electric Slide, or whether it was just some kind of crazy dream. Anyway, after the Electric Slide, we did the Chicken Dance, and we were much better at that. So we've got that to be proud of.

Posted at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)