Elf is SO clueless...

So, Friday I wandered up to Capitol Hill for my monthly haircut. While I was heading up there, I got an SMS from FallenPegasus asking me if where I was and if I wanted a ride down to my house. We hadn't had a Friday dinner together in a long time with the family. I told him my status and agreed to meet him at the salon at 5:15.

It was 5:00 when Lancer finished, so I wandered up Capitol Hill to find Body Circles. The bead had fallen out of my earring, and after three days of wandering around with a chunk of pencil eraser as an emergency fillin, it was time to get it fixed. Body Circles was gone but Laughing Buddha across the street was open, so I went there. They were really professional; the dude who did the bead refit put on gloves and a sterilized pair of pliers, and only charged me for the bead.

I caught up with FallenPegasus and he drove me back to the house. I appreciated the lift (you won't, though; there's another 1,000 words of Jake and Jinme lost to time). Omaha called and told us that she was out of hamburger meat, so we stopped at the grocery on the way home.

The house was nicely cleaned when I got there. I complimented Omaha and getting the girls to pick up all of their toys and stuff from the living room. While we started making dinner, Omaha told me that she had misjudged how many frozen fries ("chips" to the UK and Aussie types) we had and could I please go to the store and get more? "You have plenty of time," she said. "You can walk." She knows I like walking to the store.

So I walked to the store, then walked home... right into a surprise birthday party. Okay, lessee... a friend who used to visit often but now rarely does shows up to offer me a ride home, the house is suspiciously clean, my wife and daughters have been having huddled and hushed conversations ever since Wednesday, which was my birthday, and now she's trying to get me out of the house for a moment.

Just how clueless can I be?

Anyway, it was a lovely birthday party. The beautiful desirae showed up, as did kaelisinger and her adorable family. We sat, drank good wine, chatted. Omaha and the girls laid out a wonderful buffet of chips, watermelon and grapes, as well as a home-made carrot cake (yay!) and blissfully few presents.

It's a good thing, too, that not too many people showed up because we had to be in bed early. We're parents, after all.

Saturday: The hurtle!

It was Saturday, around 10:00am, when lisakit called to ask us if we wanted to go out to pancake breakfast with her and her roommate. "Sorry," I said. "We're already in downtown. We just dropped Kouryou-chan off at acting class, and now we're heading back down to the Montessori school for the monthly volunteer shift with the groundskeepers."

"It's Saturday!" Lisa said. "You guys are way too busy."

Anyway, yes, we went and did the monthly maintenance thing at Kouryou-chan's school. Gutters, weeds, watering, sweeping the whole usual deal. Lots of friendly faces; it's always nice to meet other parents who are out to help the school as well. Yamaraashi-chan was great all day, either helping or staying out of the way and playing with her Nintendo or reading a book. She rode with me when I went to fetch lunch.

We fetched Kouryou-chan from acting class, and when we got home around 3:00pm, Omaha said she didn't feel well and wanted to go lie down. She woke with a terrible cough and sore throat. Damn.

Omaha had arranged for the girls to spend some overnight time with friends so that she and I could go and be adults. It looked as if that was not going to happen. I still drove the girls up to their friends' house, and went home. Omaha insisted that she wasn't going to let go of our one chance every few weeks to go out, so we went.

We went to the Fisherman's Restaurant on Pier 57, which has a gorgeous view of the water, and with the $20 entertainment card we'd bought from Yamaraashi-chan's school as a fundraiser knocked $25 off the outrageous cost of the "Crab feast for 2," which, as it turned out, Omaha's stomach was not going to take. Pity that. The food was fabulous and there was too much of it for two, but Omaha's illness just kept her from enjoying it.

As we walked around the pier, we noticed that it was prom night. Lots of beautiful young women in prom dresses, all accompanied by young monkeys. Omaha said, "They are not monkeys!"

"Sure they are," I said. "All boys go through this. There's this period after puberty where they're beautiful young men, then they go through this monkey stage, and then they're handsome full-grown men. It's just kinda sad that there's this ritual we force on them where they have to wear a tacky tuxedo right when most of them are at the most ridiculous stage of monkeyhood. I'm pretty sure I looked just as monkeyish at my prom as they do now."

Omaha commented that one guy in an old pickup was staring at me and my kilt. She put her arm protectively around me and said, "I wish I'd thought to say something when he was looking. Like 'He's mine, you can't have him!'"

We went to the Cinerama to watch Iron Man (review later), and got home around 2. Considering that I had to be up at 8 to get the kids, we both went straight to bed.

It's mother's day!

It's the 100th Anniversary of Mother's Day, and West Virginia, which was the birthplace and residence of Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother's Day, is having a huge to-do about it all. Jarvis apparently came to hate her creation: it had been intended as a Sunday off for Mothers, and instead it became commercialized in the United States with flowers and a card and gifts and things, and the godly Ms. Jarvis detested the way the moneyed interests had taken her blessing upon mothers everywhere and turned it into a curse. She did not want this day to be "happy"; it was supposed to be a sabbath, a time of rest for women and a respectful, faith-filled honoring.

Yeah, in America. Un-huh. Pull the other one.

As revealed yesterday, Kouryou-chan and Yamaraashi-chan spent the weekend over at the house of their friends, so when I picked them up this morning, I hurtled down to the International District to drop Yamaraashi-chan off wit her mother, then Kouryou-chan and I bought flowers and a card. Of course.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have A Better Press Corp (Local NPR Affiliate Edition)?

I was driving home the other day, listening to NPR, when I heard our local State Capital reporter, Austin Jenkins (shared by KUOW and KPLU), talking about how Facebook was teaming up with state Attorneys General to protect teenagers from, well, from themselves essentially.

Jenkins said, "When Washington state attorney general Rob McKenna speaks to school groups, he often asks a question: How many of you have been asked for your A/S/L? And a lot of hands will go up. Now most adult audiences don't know what that question means. But the kids all know that when they're asked their asl they're being asked for their age, sex and location ... probably by some creepy adult."

This is a lie. And Jenkins here (a) repeats the lie promulgated by cybernanny vendors and the attorneys general (b) continues to terrify parents that they simply don't understand the Internet well enough to protect their children and therefore, Something Must Be Done. Something to justify the AG's budget, I guess.

As well documented elsewhere, the infamous "one in five" statistic ("1 in 5 children has been sexually solicited online") in incredibly misleading. The actual statistic for solicitation is 19%, which is not-- quite-- one in five, but we'll let them have the rounding error. The real statistic is 3%, or more like one in thirty. In all the other cases that Department of Justice studied, the "child" (which included people as old as seventeen years) either deliberately joined a sexually suggestive chatroom and the solicitor did not know he was speaking to a minor, or (and this was by far the most common case, representing more than half of all come-ons) the minor was being addressed by another minor. Now that might indicate harrassment, and it might be something for parents to pay attention to, but it is not stranger danger or cause for alarm. The actual intersection of criminal intent and youthful stupidity is so low that there's simply not a statistical category for it.

By repeating the deceit that when a teenager gets an A/S/L he or she is "probably" being approached by a pedophile rather than your usual fellow horny teenager, Jenkins perpetuates the Myth of the Scary Internet and does neither teens or their parents any favors at all.

For my Seattle friends...

A slight exaggeration.

Movie review: Iron Man

If you're old enough to remember pinball or pachinko, you may have experienced a machine with clatter or clank. Pinball designers-- I dated one once, although she did back glass art not tabletop design-- and the modern maintanece afficiandos know what these terms mean, even though they're really hard to define precisely. Clatter is just something the ball does that makes a noise that annoys the player. Clank is the same, but it also brings the play to a brief, annoying pause. Clank stops, clatter keeps going.

Iron Man is almost a perfect superhero film for geeks. It would have been the perfect superhero film for us if it had been missing its clatter and clank.

The plot is nothing new: Tony Stark, industrial magnate and principal stockholder of a weapons manufacturer, international playboy, and addict to high-speed women, high-octane alcohol, and high-powered machinery, is captured by the current Enemies of Peace, Justice and the American Way somewhere in the Afghan desert. (The film takes extra, extra pains to emphasize that these are not Muslims, but a rag-tag bunch of land pirates who speak a polyglot of languages and have no official religious affiliation.) Using his extraordinary genius, he creates a high-powered suit of armor that allows him to escape.

Once he gets home, he comes to the conclusion that he and his weapons-making company is responsible for the great ills of the world. He also discovers that there may be some underhanded shenanigans going on and undertakes a project to improve on his armor design and create the most impressive piece of weapons-grade machinery ever seen: the Iron Man suit of armor, and takes off to conduct his own private investigation and wreak his own revenge against the terrorists who tried to kill him.

Things get messy, there are internal pressures within his own company, and a huge battle at the end.

It's the kind of superhero film I love. We all know there's no radioactive spider gonna bite and make us into superheros. There's no teleological bullshit nextstep evolution lurking in our genes. But with enough computing power and the right suit of clothes, man can fly. I strongly prefer anime where the premise is ordinary guy gets extraordinary tech and does something interesting with it to the magical girl phenom, my love for Mai Hime not withstanding.

But there is clatter and there is clank. The clank is a non-spoiler: there's a test scene where Tony is trying out his suit's flying system, mis-judges the power setting, and slams himself into his garage's concrete wall. Hard. Like, fatally hard. It's played for laughs, he gets up like the Coyote in a Bugs Bunny film, and keeps going. That's the clank. It would have been much better if he'd worn a riding jacket and helmet (he does own them, according to the comic), and afterward the funny was showing him in this hugely over-inflated coat saying, "Thank god for airbags, eh?" to the house's AI. But no, he does the test with absolutely no safety equipment. He's dead. Movie's over.

( The clatter is a spoiler. )

Robert Downey Jr. is perfectly cast as Tony Stark. I mean, perfecto. Gwyneth Paltrow makes a lovely Pepper. Jeff Bridges, now playing the David Warner role, plays it to the hilt and actually does a good job of emulating the comicbook Stane. (Oh, short moment of clank: Stan Lee appears twice in the film in two different roles. It's jarring when you figure that out.) Terrance Howard does a convincing Jim Rhodes. The cast really is wonderful and carries the non-fight scenes quite well. If only the director had had an extra ten seconds of restraint, it might have been the perfect powered-armor movie.

It's still the best powered-armor movie out there, and I'll be buying the DVD the moment it comes out.