Another closet!?

As some people may know (and as may be painfully obvious from a few episodes in the Travellogue series) I went to a prep school, one of the top five in the country. It was an all-male school where homophobia was rampant, where the professors were all tenured neurotics of one flavor or another, where there was unheralded sexual tension between the aging, portly, respectable British ex-pat head librarian with his collection of Chaucer printers (The Canterbury Tales, first, second, third, and fifth editions) and the new ultra-hot-in-a-librarian-way assistant librarian (the sex scene in Mice and Malice? Totally in his office), where some teachers were so mindlessly brilliant and others were merely mindless.

My parents couldn't really afford to send me there, nor did I fit in. But as I have gotten older and developed a taste for the finer things in life, I have realized that not all of the shallow, grasping people around me were complete idiots. It is peculiar how so many of my peers at the time wore such fine clothes and seemed to respect it less for being excellent, how much time and energy they spent just staying in the game rather than trying to get ahead, how little they saw their careers ahead as difficult or complex or contributory. Politics or Wall Street was the ideal; so few were interested in the mathematics or sciences.

But still, the clothes were nice. I actually miss my Brooks Brothers suit, the one thing I was required to own that I didn't really want at the time.

I have a bookbag. Most of my acquaintances have seen it, although few recall it because it's just so unremarkable, an ordinary black bag. It was swag from my stint at F5 Corporation and what's remarkable about it that it was made by Land's End. It's relatively cheap for Land's End, made of a rugged nylon, and one of the straps is about to break off. It's seven years' old and I beat the hell out of my stuff (which is why I have a Palm m500 and a Thinkpad: both have a reputation for being far more rugged than their contemporaries and counterparts), so I'm not surprised that the strap eyelet is torn and about to give way.

I've been looking at Land's End (and, gods help me, L.L. Bean) for the replacement, and I think I've found what I want, but as I'm looking through the catalogs I'm realizing something.

I might be a late-blooming preppie.

Grief.

"Science" is a scare word now.

I heard this yesterday and it made me wonder what the heck Mitt Romney was talking about. He said, "Senator Obama is wrong if he thinks science-based sex education has any place in kindergarten. We should be working to clean up the filthy waters our kids are swimming in."

First, the non-sequitor there is just plain surreal, but what caught my eye was Romney's use of the phrase, "science-based." Apparently, Romney is responding to a throwaway quote from Barak Obama, "But it's the right thing to do, to provide age-appropriate sex education, science-based sex education in schools." It's no trick to figure out how Romney got "kindergarten" out of "age appropriate," that's just plain scare politics.

But my brain keeps circling back to the phrase "science-based." Why would Romney say it that way?

Rick Perlstein set me straight. Romney is playing up the idea science is scary. Science is bad. Science is what wants to bar your children's hearts from god, teach them they're monkeys, that our star and our world is ordinary, that the principles of physics do not care about them.

Romney wants to ride the eloi to victory with the promise that he'll keep the scary morlocks over there.

Claim Jumper begins its long slow slide downhill.

The American western restaurant is about two simple things: good meat (mostly beef), and lots of it. The Claim Jumper has always attempted to be the epitome of such a restaurant, at least as a chain with an originally American Western theme: huge servings, often enough for two or three meals, and one dish called the "Ore Cart" which is nothing more than about three pounds of meat cooked four or five different ways.

The Claim Jumper has never been Omaha's and my favorite restaurant, but for some reason tonight we were inspired to go. Unfortunately, our experience was not great, and this is the second time in a row the Claim Jumper has fallen far below expectations.

Omaha ordered the ribs-and-chicken meal. The ribs were undercooked and tough, the chicken unremarkable. She likes sweet things and she complained that the barbecue sauce had too much sugar. I ordered the prime rib, which started at a pound and, at a pound, was four dollars more expensive than the same cut of meat at that other steakhouse, the Keg.

Unfortunately, the meat was of a significantly lesser quality than what I've had elsewhere. Prime rib, however, is usually accompanied by horseradish (or as the kids put it, "pain") as a condiment. They gave me a horseradish and mayonnaise sauce. I asked for straight-up horseradish. The waitress gave it to me. It was stale, with absolutely no bite whatsoever, with nothing to recommend it at all. It had the faint aroma of horseradish, but it didn't reach up and yank of my sinuses the way it should.

The last straw came when Omaha ordered the "deep dish apple pie." Instead, what she got was apple slices in a bowl of sweet syrup with a vaguely pie-like topping. It was terrible. We left it on the table, and Omaha complained and had it struck from the bill.

Which doesn't make up for the general impression that the Claim Jumper has started its long slow slide into failure. It follows a long line of similar chains, most recently Tony Roma's, which started to skimp on the quality of its fare to extract one extra dollar per person from its patrons. Omaha and I will probably not be going back there anytime soon.

Matrix Revolutions falls apart in 8 minutes, 10 seconds.

I watched the first ten minutes of Matrix: Revolutions, a movie many people have asked me not to watch just because they didn't want me to be disappointed. Too late. Ten minutes into the film, I'm disappointed.

The Wachowski Brothers seem to think that they can change the meaning of the Matrix from an massive virtual reality in which human beings are pawns and environment providers and within which some of the programs have arisen to consciousness, or free will (the two aren't the same) and now vie for control of their respective futures, to one in which the Matrix is a metaphor for the actual inner workings of the operating system a'la Tron.

The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded were smarter than their writers deserved. No wonder it all fell apart so fast.