Some Words

In my youth, Highlander was popular. Not world beating everyone knows all about it popular, but popular. Several movies were made. There were, I believe, two television series. From around seventh grade on, people would ask me if my name was like the Highlander’s.

The first thing that was absurd about this was that they always said, “Macleod, like the highlander?” There seemed to be some suspicion that I would surprise the world, and English spelling, by saying “No.” Of course Macleod like the damned highlander. It was, in fact, spelled the same way.

The second thing that annoyed me was that they always seemed to want me to gush about the movie or show. Now, while they’re hardly high art, there are certainly worse things that humans have produced. But that doesn’t mean I’m a particular fan. I don’t own the DVDs or any of that. So it baffled me why people always seemed to expect me to gush about the Highlander franchise. As if I was somehow expected to be grateful that my surname was somehow lifted from obscurity to the heights of stardom. But it’s really the “no relation” category that’s supposed to bother you, so Highlander being fictional, it felt like I was not allowed to be annoyed. While there are plenty of at least marginally famous Macleods out there (many spellings) none of us seems to have risen to the point that I have to declare that I don’t know them. (I checked on Wikipedia by the way, it seems that there are several Macleods writing science fiction, several politicians, and one female Macleod who’s greatest claim to fame is being topless in Snakes on a Plane. Thank god that movie didn’t do well at the box office, Highlander was annoying, I’d hate to have to answer “Macleod, like the lady who got her tit bit in Snakes on a Plane?”)

You can imagine that I’ve enjoyed the franchise’s slip into relative obscurity.

There are many men named Ian. It was once one of the most popular names for boys in Britain.

But I was informed by my sister in law this holiday season that “Uncle Ian” is the villain in Alvin and the Chipmunks. My nieces and nephews apparently love that franchise. So now, sharing baldness with the villain, it appears I’ve got a new piece of cultural detritus to live with. Other Ians, please become more famous. I need you to overshadow some chipmunks.

Obviously for filing under first world problems.

I have not, until a month ago, had a smartphone. I joined the rest of the people I knew in the modern world when I bought an iPhone 4S. This is somewhat amusing, as three years spent in IT left me with Facebook and Google+ feed full of people posting reasons they won’t ever buy another Apple or MS product. Well whatever, I got a damned iPhone, and those friends can deal.

For the first two weeks, Siri actually did a fantastic job recognizing the names of my friends. I was flat out amazed. It did it right out of the box, and never seemed to miss a beat. But over the past two weeks, results have progressively declined in value. My wife’s name is Kelli. She spells it with an i, and I tease her for it. But Siri handled it just fine until a week an a half ago. Then I would ask it to call Kelli, and it would say I didn’t have any contacts named Kelly. It stuck to this, and eventually I got it to work around based on using both first and last name. Now Siri insists that it can’t call anyone named Kelly McCloud. It handled my last name just fine last week. It brings up, a list of my family members, all spelled Macleod, as an example of how it doesn’t have any McClouds, but it could call one of these other wastrels if you want. But fuck all if you want to call someone on that list, it won’t do it. You have to add the layer of telling it, no, you idiot, you pronounce it right when you read it out to me but you insist on some other spelling.

It’s really this break between the insistence on spelling while still being able to correctly pronounce the names that makes it infuriating. Two of my best friends ever are named Eric and Erik. I will continue to omit their last names, but those are different. When I ask that it call Erik 2 it says it doesn’t have an Erik, but it could call Eric 1 or Erik 2. Note that I use his full name to give it context. It pronounces both first and last back to me, saying it doesn’t have an Eric 2 but it could call x where Erik 2. So, it really gets it all right, but insists that no one would ever name their child Erik or Kelli.

I understand that when two spellings are pronounced the same way, it has to make a choice for display, but it sees that there is an alternate spelling in my contacts list, indexes that alternate spelling, suggests that alternate spelling, but insists that the only valid spelling of the pronounced names Erik and Kelli is Eric and Kelly.

The overall effect is darkly comical. Siri is the spelling police. No you crazy Americans with your alternate name spellings, Siri draws a line in the sand, a line that says Erik is wrong. Only hateful idiots would use a spelling other than the Siri approved one. Have you considered misspelling the names of your friends in Siri to get them to index correctly? Siri would like you to consider doing that.

I’ve read over this, and I think I’m having a hard time expressing how surreal it feels. I just said: “Call Kelli Macleod” and Siri replies with audio and text: “I don’t have a Kelly McCloud, but perhaps you meant one of these “Jamie Macleod or Kelli Macleod” and reads those names to me with correct pronunciation. Madness. I would have just said, “Oh well, it’s voice technology and it’s not quite there yet” if it had not worked perfectly well two weeks ago.

One of my favorite book stores will be closing in January. When I lived in Minneapolis I was just two blocks north of their old location. I would walk down to Dreamhaven and marvel at all the old science fiction paperbacks. I got all my Delany and Lovecraft there. Beautiful old paperbacks with that scent that comes off the cheap paper when you unseal the plastic protector. I sometimes found myself contemplating how much better my childhood would have been had I grown up near Dreamhaven. I would have read a lot less of that TSR crap that got shoved out by the bucket, and a lot more of the grand masters of imagination.

I moved to Portland, and Dreamhaven moved south to a different storefront at the same time. The sale was fantastic, and I stocked up on Lieber, Dick, Heinlein, Sturgeon and so many others. The nice paperbacks cost a bit more, but if you weren’t worried about the pages falling out from time to time, you could practically get books by the pound.

Neil Gaiman once said that you had to love the place because it stocked a category called “vintage smut.” I respect that kind of cheeky, but the staff (and the books, as discussed above) were what brought me back. They were always some of the nicest people I’d see all day. That mattered when they were in the dense pack of used bookstores that you find in Uptown Minneapolis.

Apparently moving to the new smaller storefront went well for a while, but Greg, who runs this blessed place, says that foot traffic has gone down over the last year. I’d be tempted to blame the location change, but that would be getting my timing wrong. I’ve been gone over three years, and he says the walk-ins slowed just last year. Still, when I go back to Minneapolis I try to always make it down there, and it is harder in the new location, but that may be because I’ve always been sort of bound to Uptown.

I won’t be back in the Cities before January, so, sadly, I’ve been to Dreamhaven for my last time, and I didn’t even know it. The website will still sell, and Greg is apparently keeping the location, but just to use as a storehouse. It’s good to know it’s not the complete end of Dreamhaven, but you can’t get that Ace Double smell off a website. I’ll miss you Dreamhaven.

Just over five years ago, I moved in with my then girlfriend, now wife. At the time, my apartment was disorganized, and a cadre of friends descended on it while I was at work, threw stuff in bags and left those bags at the new place. I was partway through ripping my CDs to my hard drive. When I was grumpy about my CDs no longer being organized by whether I had ripped them or not, I was reminded that I hadn’t been sufficiently prepped for the move, hence the trash bags. Today, five years later (five years two months actually), I have finished ripping those CDs.

With a little bit more time on my hands, I’ve decided to get back into mixing shape. When I mixed a drink for friends recently, I’ve felt slow. Stuff I used to love to make just doesn’t come out right. For some things this was not surprising. For whatever reason, I find that my timing on a martini gets off if I haven’t done one recently. I got through the same motions, but if they aren’t practiced, the drink just doesn’t taste quite right.

So of course in jumping back in I picked a drink that always used to haunt me: the Ramos Gin Fizz.

It’s a pain in the ass, and I’ve never ordered it in a bar because it takes so much of the bartender’s time. The mojito takes a while, and I’ll only order if it things are slow. I don’t want the bartender having to rush and potentially mess up the drink, and I sure as hell don’t want him frustrated with me for rushing him. The Ramos Gin Fizz takes, I don’t know… four times as long?

Many have mixed it before me, and they probably did better. It’s always been a drink that haunts me. I either get separation or tiny little balls of curdled milk-fat in it, depending on whether I shake it little or too much. I think I got it right once, and fortunately my wife was there to taste it too.

Ramos Gin Fizz

• 2 oz. Gin
• 1 oz. cream
• 1/2 oz. lime juice
• 1/2 oz. lemon juice
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 1 egg white
• Tiny dash of orange flower water

Toss all that together and shake without ice until your arms start to feel tired. Then add ice and shake again until your arms are tired. Pour into glass and add soda to top. You’ll know it worked if you taste it and don’t think how much cream you put in, but instead get a light airy taste of citrus and flower. In my experience if you let it sit for a while it can still separate, so drink up. I won’t go into the disasters that can happen here, but let’s just say you won’t like it if it goes wrong.

Sure, they’re going for subtext, but most of them aren’t that good at it.

It would be nice if Huntsman won. He’d have a hard time getting my vote, but I’d rather have someone who I trust to just run the government in a way I dislike. The rest seem like they would burn the nation to the ground if they could only get to be president of the smoldering wreckage.

The other day there was a NY Times article about novelists predicting the future. Now, on a long enough time scale, that’s going to happen with fiction. Of course the NYTimes article don’t talk about how Asimov had sentient androids with “positronic brains” wandering around the same world where people still used slide rules for calculation. That sort of missed prediction just gets swept under the carpet, despite the fact that people have long looked to Asimov for ideas on the kinds of tech they should try to invent. On some level, there is predictive power in science fiction, because if it’s possible, compelling, and grabs the mind of someone at a young enough age, they will grow up to try to invent it. The possible becomes the real. And IO9 had a nice little takedown of the article, much needed. So it was with a sense of self amusement that I notice today, while looking for oxygen bleach, that Target sells compressed scented air. Oh my God! Spaceballs predicted the future!

Finishing a graduate program can feel like getting back a life you did not know you had lost. I finished with the bar exam a few days ago, and suddenly feel as if parts of my personality I had not known were shut off have re-emerged. It is a surreal feeling. I look around and find that I am judging myself, not on my past actions, but on the viewpoints that I have. I do not argue with the viewpoints themselves, but I find myself questioning why I had felt the need to shut off certain ambitions, hobbies, etc.

Two nights ago, I picked up my bass guitar for the first time in at least a month. I had done scale work when I was highly stressed during finals, but this was the first time in a long time I had picked up the instrument purely to enjoy playing it. It was as close to revelatory as you can get without actually experiencing a revelation. I found myself wondering why I had voluntarily subjected myself to this kind of self abnegation.

I’ve also pushed through several books without feeling guilty. More on that later. It’s a great feeling, a feeling of freedom, a little fear over the debt that’s looming. But it was a reminder, I think I got out fairly close to unscathed. But in this economy, people talk about the debt you can take on going back to school. There are other things you can lose. I should have considered that more closely.

I am often dismayed by the willingness of political writers to use the lives of individual legislators as proxies for the state of the nation, thus saving themselves from having to think too hard. Witness today’s article about Patrick Kennedy cleaning out his office, used, by several of the commentators in the article to connote the decline of liberalism in America.

Here are the two quotes I’m thinking of:

“This is a family that once had the presidency and two Senate seats, and they’re now down to the mayor of Santa Monica,” said Darrell M. West, a Brookings Institution scholar. “It’s a pretty dramatic fall, and it’s symbolic of the decline of liberalism.”

Norman J. Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, said that while Mr. Kennedy’s departure was minor in the scheme of things, that he and his father were being replaced as the only father-son team in Congress by Representative Ron Paul of Texas and Senator-elect Rand Paul of Kentucky, who hail from the libertarian Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, was indicative of “the kind of sea change we’re going through” on Capitol Hill.

The first one attempts to hide the absurdity of his sentiment by calling it symbolism. But even as symbolism it’s hollow. To be sure, the far left has taken a drubbing. But the presence of blood relations in Congress has nothing to do with it.

Try phrasing it like this: “The power of a political ideology can been seen in the number of blood relations that semi-dynastic families supporting that ideology manage to get elected.”

It really reveals how colossally stupid the idea is. Yet that sentiment is essentially what these two quotes try to accomplish. Sadly, the strong personalities that the Kennedys, Bushes, and Pauls of the world represent are too much for many commentators and reporters to ignore. All too often political ideologies are conceived of by the commentariat as simply the manifestations of these powerful personalities. If they’re blood relations? So much the better. You just wave your hands around and call it symbolism. I don’t think many of Rand Paul’s votes came from people who wanted to symbolically endorse Ron Paul’s viewpoints by electing his son.

As an aside, the first quote calls the lack of Kennedys in national elected positions a “dramatic fall,” but really, it’s only a fall if you think later generations not choosing to go into politics is in some way a failing of those younger generations. Maybe Joseph P. Kennedy would have thought of it that way. But I doubt Edward M. Kennedy Jr., who founded his own company and to the best of my knowledge never ran for any elected office, loses much sleep over it.

Now if you’ll excuse me. I’m going to go back to studying for my federal courts exam…

I don’t have time to watch many full games of hockey, what with school and all (so of course I’m posting here). But I watch highlights on TSN’s site from time to time. They have little ads that play before the clip reel. Today one of the ads had a guy complaining that only a Full Windsor would do for tying a tie. He thinks less of those who don’t use a FW. The tagline is that if they are that careful about the ties, they must be careful about the money. I don’t know. Maybe they’re so busy worrying about the ties that they don’t have time to pay attention to the money?

Two of my favorite comic creators, Ryan North and David Maliki have defeated Glenn Beck in Amazonian combat. Their book being number one on Amazon and not his pissed off the Paranoia Artist to the point that he attacked the book. This included the hilariously egocentric statement that his books are always #1. Man, if that guy ever falls off the map, he’s gonna fall hard. What I love about this is that it basically casts Beck in the role he usually assigns to the Dems, complaining that a media insurgent with no gravitas is spewing about stuff that has a negative impact on society. North and Maliki are in the Beck role of making money just because the bigger entity has taken the time to attack. This is not to say that I think North and Maliki are crazy like Beck, just that they’ve turned the tables on him.

Transcript of the Beck stuff from the Machine of Death website: Sound and Fury

I submit that any of my friends could have heard these two tracks, and without knowing whether I’d heard them, predict that I would like them. They are like a catalog of my guilty and not so guilt pleasures compressed into easily accessible four minute tours of “Production Techniques that Ian is a Sucker For.” That’s not to say that they cover every single one of them, but the number of bases covered is nevertheless impressive.

Azure Ray – Don’t Leave My Mind

Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. – Nothing But Our Love

I feel like these tracks are lineal decedents of The Notwist’s “Pick Up the Phone.”