Labor Day Weekend and Its Environs

(11:48:36 CDT)

Labor Day Weekend and Its Environs

I have already mentioned Sarah's race, but I figured I would fill in the other gaps and fun time notes from mine and Sarah's Labor Day Weekend. Roughly collected by "topic".

Homework: I'll start with the most boring. I did some homework. I know, exciting, right? The assignment (or an assignment, since there were half a dozen when you factor in both classes) was to look up "literature" (mostly articles) on TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES. Maybe that's "technology in libraries"? Is there a difference? Anyhow, it went faster than I realized it would and I read 12-15 articles and picked out the 10 to include in my lit-review and actually enjoyed it. One of them was near thirty pages long, and way over-verbose, but even it was kind of interesting because it talked about how e-ref (by this, I mean reference questions handled through e-mail or some other text-based Internet method) has problems due to patrons treating it similar to a search engine. Google tells them an answer immediately, why can't a librarian? The article also gave lots of samples of e-ref gone awry (my favorite was a 13 year old girl asking why her female friend might be confused by her hitting on her). There was from another article, about the use of electronic reference (another use of the word e-ref means things like dictionaries you look up online) and how more and more libraries are going that way. It was called "The E-Ref Invasion". The picture was spead out over two pages at the start, and some editorial choice decided to put just the world "INVASION" over the second page, along with a picture of library patrons (the article is only three years old, but somehow the picture looks like it would be right at home in a much earlier time, photos of libraries do that). It made me chuckle, because I couldn't help but think about our country's anti-intellectual movement over the past few years:

Plumbing: I tweeted over the weekend about Sarah and I having to wait until Tuesday to get water back because the downstairs neighbor was having some sort of backed up pipes issue. Yesterday, during and after the storm, the plumber finally came out and got the pipes fixed. About 5pm, yesterday, one of the apartment workers comes up and leaves a note on our door. The note reads something along the lines of "Either you are a neighbor has poured grease down the drain, THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE" and a few other "threats" in ALL-CAPS. Now, Sarah and I tend to use olive oil and rarely fry things in any sort of manner that would lead to grease build up, but this is an apartment. Who know how long some unholy mix of hair and tea leaves and grease and soap and whatever else has been building up down in those pipes? Surely they have this problem at least once a year. It just caught us off guard because of the fact that we are on first name terms with the management here, and they could have came up and asked but instead we get something like a form letter with threats in all caps. This is actually the second one (and I am guessing that they somehow consider the two as proof of some pipe-clogging conspiracy). The first was about a large quantity of feminine hygeine products—I'll spare the details, but Sarah doesn't use what she was accused of using—snaked out of the same pipes. The thing is, our downstairs neighbor is an older woman and not likely to use the latter, either. And, while she might be dumping heavy grease down into the sink, she has been here as long as Sarah and myself (6 years) so I am confused how it is a problem, now. Maybe it wasn't grease, maybe it was the blob. Just looking for a place to chill.

Another Broken Egg Cafe: Went to pick up Sarah's regristration packet on Friday and stopped off at Another Broken Egg Cafe (Backronym for a name, maybe?). It was good. Pricey, mind you. Breakfast with two entrees, an appetizer, coffee and juice cost us $40. Their eggs benedict were good (not great), the country ham was the best I have ever had, and the fresh squeezed orange juice was a treat. Skip the "southern biscuit beignets". The dough is thicker (being southern style biscuit dough) and doesn't work quite as well as the lighter version you can get. And you only get eight or so (about one to two biscuits' worth of batter at best) for five dollars. Overall, I would say pricey and not quite worth it, but they have enough different things that an occasionally stop off there for dishes you can't get around here isn't a bad idea.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars: Picked this up for the DS over the weekend. It's not a bad game at all. I think I prefer the "bigger" GTAs, but there are some neat features. If you are a GTA fan and have a DS and aren't going to whinge about the graphics then I say give it a try. It has a drug trading side quest that is kind of fun. You buy and then can later resell at higher prices if you play it right. There is also a scratch card lotto that is pretty addicting. You buy the cards and then scratch them off (you can use your finger nail on the DS for extra fun) and you can end up spending an hour trying for a big prize. For me, the best feature is the wanted level feature. While there appear to be more cops than ever before (lots and lots of cops, Jesus) you can get rid of wanted levels by crashing cop cars or causing them to crash. It's not perfect, At least twice I have carjacked a vehicle, parked it somewhere, then came back to it a few seconds later and had it treat it as a second carjacking. Also, if you just shoot the cops outside of their car, it increases instead of decreasing the wanted level. Wrecking cop cars = good. Shooting cops = bad. I understand why they did it, but it feels sort of weird. Still, though, thumbs up on the game.

New Music: If you have a chance, try out the new Mew album. It has a long title that I cannot recall. Hold up, let me look it up, it's No More Stories Are Told Today I'm Sorry They Washed Away No More Stories The World Is Grey I'm Tired Let's Wash Away. I think it came out yesterday, maybe last week. I enjoy it. On top of that, two slightly older CDs worth a listen are Abney Park's Lost Horizons and The Romanovs' And the Moon Was Hungry. I got those three and Granddaddy's Under the Western Freeway. It's been sort of an experimental cabaret meets Euro-alt week for me, I guess.

X-Files: Sarah and I sat down and finished watching the third season of X-Files which is the season that X-Files, to me, hit its stride. If anything bothers me, it's the fact that the fans had turned more to Mulder and so the ubersmart Scully starts getting downplayed and even played out as pigheaded and holding up everything, while Mulder morphed from the guy that got beat up in every episode to somewhere between Christlike and badass. Still, though, I really liked the episode about "Hell Money" and the one with Big Blue. That, and Agent X always puts a smile on my face.

Movies: Watched a handful of movies this weekend but cannot recall which ones, now. Heh. Let's see, there was The Royal Tenebaums which Sarah watched for the fist time and liked it a lot. We were going to see Dr. Strangelove but never did. We did watch Timecrimes, a spanish SF thriller about a hapless man who gets sent back in time while running from an attacker who stabbed him. We also watched Akhiyon Se Goli Maare, which is the silliest Bollywood movie I have watched. It also has a couple of scenes that I am pretty sure are racist against Indian muslims, but not 100% sure. Maybe as much as half of its jokes are encapsulated by some weird loose mouth stutter the main character does whenever pretending to be a gangster (the kind of stutter that would be deemed funny on a Disney sitcom for teens and pretty much nowhere else). After awhile, you start laughing in annoyance. The songs are limited to the main two characters, and there are no fun songs to spruce it up (though some of the outfits the busty lead female wears are at least eye candy, while the guy wheres a few outfits that are distractingly bad.). The primary thing I can say in its favor, outside of its generally unoffensive nature, is that the core story is very reminiscent of those old Italian comedic plays that Shakespeare was a fan of. A gangster tries to hook his daughter up with a despicable criminal, but due to a misunderstanding, she ends up with a straight-laced nerdy guy with lots of money. For a while, the father is unaware, and by the time he comes aware, the two are in love. The loverboy has to pretend to be a dangerous criminal to win the father over, and through a series of misadventures, gets a dangerous reputation. About this time, though, the grandfather shows up and forces his son to go straight, and suddenly the criminal son-in-law is no longer wanted and so has to find a way to fix the damage. There are a handful of idiot side-kicks and teachers and such, adding to that Italian play feel.

Ok, I'm pretty sure that's plenty. I'm going to read for a bit and then possibly watch Repo: The Genetic Opera before class.

Si Vales, Valeo

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