Crosswalks to Nowhere

My plan this year was to plant and maintain my plot at Cypress Gardens so that by this time of year I would have all sorts of vegetables and flowers filling the trunk of my car.

In April, I went out there and put up my chicken wire fence, and in May I bought some mulch and made a few pathways and planted some sunflower seeds just to get started. I planned on planting tomatoes, all sorts of peppers, and maybe even watermelon or cantaloupe.

Well, the summer got away from me. You can see the results above.

I went there this morning to clear out the stuff I left in the plot, and while my little section of the world was overgrown (I like to call it a "prairie preserve") I happened to notice that my sunflowers were the tallest in all of Cypress Gardens. If you head south on Arlington Heights Road, you can still see them-- they're past their prime, but still standing, right there in the middle of everything.

I think gardening will have to wait until I can just step outside my door instead of driving a mile.

Yesterday the Arlington Heights Park District hosted the annual Autumn Harvest Festival at North School Park. Here's Rebecca playing "Count Trickula" with the South Wind Ensemble. Proud dad over here.

And here's Emma relaxing after I picked her up from dance class. She missed Bec's performance, but I have it committed to tape (thanks to Lisa) so we all enjoyed it during today's thunderstorms.

I've taken the kids to the Festival every year since 2000, and this was the first year it wasn't cold and/or raining. I also bought some mega-sweet natural honey at the Farmers Market right on the street across from the park.

We finished up the day with dinner with my folks at Periyali. Opaaa!

On a storefront in downtown Arlington Heights:

Today is Buster Keaton's birthday. Those are his words in the title of this blog entry, denying the "genius" title given to him by people who discovered his work long after it was made.

When most people think of silent film comedians these days, they think of Chaplin's Little Tramp and maybe Harold Lloyd, hanging from the face of a clock. Buster Keaton's comedy was far more inventive and, despite the slapstick, it was more subtle.

One of the keys to Keaton's character was the fact that no matter what unpleasantness befell him, he always found some resourceful way around it. Jumping through a window or over a ledge would always result in Buster's getting away from a chase or into the arms of his leading lady, and through it all keeping the legendary "stone face" expression.

My introduction to Keaton was when the local PBS station ran the series Buster Keaton: A Hard Act To Follow, and my view of silent film, especially silent film comedy, changed forever. Since then, I've seen (and collected) several of his films, and during last year's Silent Summer Festival I saw The Navigator on the big screen with accompaniment by a live organist.

Wikipedia has an excellent biography of Buster here, and you can also spend a lot of time surfing the International Buster Keaton Society's site.

Finally, a piece of Keaton history/folklore: he was supposedly buried with a rosary in one pocket and a deck of cards in the other, just so he'd be prepared for wherever he wound up in the afterlife.

Happy Birthday, Buster!

The battery on my iPod has never been a stellar performer; it usually died after about 90 minutes of playing.. if I was lucky.

I decided to order this battery kit and performed the installation today. One of the nice things about this kit was the fact that they gave you the tools to pry open your iPod without having to worry about bending the metal case. The other nice thing was that they provide detailed, illustrated instructions on how to do it, which is a good thing since they cram a lot of stuff into those little boxes.

The new battery also has 30% more capacity than the original battery, according to the specifications.

The iPod is now on the charger, so I'll have a report in a few days on how the new battery performs.

Today was the annual fifth-grade trip to Camp Tu-Endie-Wie near Elgin. This is a day for the kids to participate in all sorts of nature education and team-building exercises. I was a team lead, so I spent the day in the fresh air in charge of 12 kids instead of behind a keyboard in charge of, well, other things.

Above you see Emma's group learning a lesson about how the deer population grows and shrinks depending on the resources available to them.

The kids had a great time, playing games, working on crafts, doing archery, and building a shelter out of sticks in the woods.

(Emma took the photo above, and she wanted to see it here in the weblog. So here it is!)

By the way, "Tu-Endie-Wie" is a Wyandotte Indian phrase meaning "the point between two waters."

The day ended with a singalong around the campfire.

Emma fell asleep in the car on the way home. I think she had a great time.

Last week, I hooked up my cassette deck and ripped MP3s from some of my old tapes that have been tucked away for a while. You can see the results if you click on "What's Playing on jtl's iPod?" in the column on the right. I didn't realize I had a lot of this stuff...

Probably the best find I've had so far is under the playlist called "12 Tracks From 525 Lines." This was a tape I started once I got my first HiFi VCR (a Mitsubishi HS-U50, for you video geeks in the crowd), where I would record musical acts on TV and transfer them to audio cassette with pretty sweet results.

Many of the songs were recorded from the late, lamented NBC's Sunday Night, hosted by Jools Holland and David Sanborn, which begat Night Music, hosted only by Sanborn. These shows ran from 1988 to 1990. This show was awesome: it featured many different acts, from Dr. John to Branford Marsalis to Leonard Cohen, all playing with the house band, led by the host(s) of the show. This was the first place I heard Debbie Harry's version of "Calmarie," a haunting Brazilian number written by Nana Vasconselos. They also gave airtime to one of the most underrated bands of all time, the latin/jazz/funk/art rock/you-figure-it-out fusion band Ambitious Lovers. Hearing their performances of "Copy Me" and "Admit It" drove me to the record store the next day to buy the LP. (I managed to get a copy of the CD from someone on eBay last year.)

Technically, the process went okay. I used my desktop PC with Cool Edit 2000 (which later became the bloated Adobe Audition) to bring the tracks over, and it worked okay despite some problems with the audio inputs on my computer, primarily with levels.

I decided during the week to pick up a Griffin iMic which connects through the USB port. I hooked it up to my PC and did some more transfers this weekend, and at first pass it seems to work pretty well. I've not been able to get it to work with my iBook, though, so there's a little more work in store.

One track that I've wanted for a long time on MP3 is Third World's "Try Jah Love," which they performed on SCTV in 1982. This version is a little livelier than the version that was officially released that year. I also ripped the entire "Great White North" album, which is still funny in its own way after all these years. So take off, eh?

More transfers to follow.. if anything else of interest comes up, you'll hear about it here.

I connected the webcam again, so if you click the "Live Cam" link on the right you'll get to see how Columbus Day looks over here.

Update: I turned it off 'cause we're going to lunch, but it will be back on later.

Remember these guys? At one time they were the big name in home computing, along with Atari, TI, and um, that company with the rainbow logo in the shape of an apple.

After passing through various hands over the years (including German and Dutch companies, finally landing in the hands of another Dutch outfit called Yeahronimo Media Ventures), Commodore is now back with an online music store.

Huh?

I guess (to them) it makes sense to follow the Apple model: sell some MP3 players and then create a place where people can populate them.

The music selection is a little sparse and unusual, but maybe that will change as time goes on. I guess they're hoping this will bring the Commodore name back in front of everyone, just like the iPod did for Apple.

In the meantime, I'll keep playing my old C-64 games on the VICE emulator while getting jealous of my old Commodore buddy Dan who just bought a complete C-64 system with some new-old-stock software and peripherals.

We're partyin' like it's 1985.

Here is the video from today's Apple event where Steve Jobs introduced the new iMac, the new iPods, and the new iTunes video features.

Some things never change-- this reminds me a lot of the videos we used to see back in '89 when Steve was running NeXT.

The new products look pretty cool, I must admit. And as for their impact on our world, I defer to Lisa.

I've been looking for a decent backup program for the Mac for a while. Every recommendation I've received has been either expensive and overblown with unnecessary features (e.g., .Mac) or mind-numbingly complicated (e.g., some French program I downloaded). For the near term, I've been copying my user files to my iPod and then transferring that data to the second (300 GB) drive on my desktop XP machine.

All that changed when I learned about a package called SuperDuper. This is a great little program which serves the single purpose of backing up your data without a huge hassle.

I have an external firewire drive, and when I run SuperDuper it duplicates (get it?) the contents of my iBook's drive to the firewire drive. I can even boot from the firewire drive once the backups are complete.

My iBook's hard drive has about 30 GB used on it, and it took about 35 minutes to back the entire thing up. By registering the package, you get the ability to perform incremental backups, so that only the changes to your hard drive are reflected in your backup image. That saves a big chunk of time in the backup process.

I've always been a proponent of purchasing really good shareware when I come across it. SuperDuper cost $19.95 and is worth every cent.

Today was one of those nonstop days.

It started with running out for bagels, then over to the orthodontist for Becka (where I learned that Dr Schneider, my orthodontist and the guy who instructed Beck's, is still alive and kicking). Emma had her dance class, then we picked up Lisa and went to Subway. Then it was time for Emma to be picked up followed by Becka having to be driven to the mall with three of her peeps, and on the way back I saw Art for a haircut.

Oh, but that's not all. We took Lisa home so she could head off to a party with her pals in Indy, and Emma and I went to the SWANCC Computer and Electronics Recycling Event to get rid of a bunch of old computer and video parts I had collecting dust in the house. Then it was off on the promised trip to Borders, where Emma got another Magic Tree House book and I picked up Heavy Words Lightly Thrown, which so far is a very interesting read.

Becka went out again to see Elizabethtown, and Emma and I went to see The Corpse Bride. Becka gave her movie a 4/10 rating, and I gave the movie we saw an 8/10.

(A mini-diversion/capsule review follows:)

I never saw The Nightmare Before Christmas so can't make any comparisons, but I have been a fan of Tim Burton's since Beetlejuice. Corpse Bride continues the dark, strange view of the afterlife, where, certainly in this case, there's a far more colorful life than what the characters with pulses enjoy. Johnny Depp is great voicing the man who accidentally marries a dead woman, and Helena Bonham Carter brings the character of the deceased Emily to, uh, life (sorry, it's late). Tracey Ullman is wonderful as always, and Richard E. Grant (whom I know best as the manager of the Spice Girls in Spice World) plays a really evil dude who's responsible for a lot of this mess. Definitely worth seeing on the big screen.

Whew. Now I am going to catch my breath and watch the Cinemax SCTV episodes I taped back in '84 while I convert them to DVD.

We've had great weather this weekend, mostly in the upper 60s. I snapped the photo above from my dining room window, but the picture doesn't do justice to the color that was blazing there.

This reminded me of a song by The Dream Academy, called (coincidentally enough) "Indian Summer." This was from their 1987 album Remembrance Days, an album I was playing a lot at that time because the stock market had just crashed and the group I was working in had to be at the Chicago Board of Trade Building around the clock, and the team's cassette player was the only way of keeping our sanity. (This was the other album I was listening to a lot, along with this.)

The Dream Academy was a post-punk folk-almost-progressive-rock band that was discovered by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. They had a top-10 hit in the US with their song "Life in a Northern Town," which has appreared on many 80s compilation CDs. Their music was also a favorite of John Hughes, and Dream Academy songs are all over Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Planes Trains and Automobiles.

When I was searching for the lyrics on the next page, I found this Dream Academy fan site which, in addition to having lots of information about band, lists me in their "thank yous." I probably gave some info on the band to a Usenet group back in the day, since I owned a bunch of Dream Academy rarities. That was a nice little discovery for a Sunday afternoon.

Enjoy the weather. Soon we'll be closing the windows.

Tonight was Emma's school concert. We made sure to get there with a decent amount of time to spare because, as those of you without kids may not know, parents can be worse than fifth graders when it comes to saving seats.

As always, the kids did a super job with songs like "Wacky Weather" and "Dem Bones." The concert ended with everyone rooting for the White Sox in "Take Me Out To The Ballgame."

I have a few items up for sale on eBay, so I'm using my blog for shameless plug purposes.

Netgear MA111 USB Adapter

Dual Firewire 1394 Cardbus PCMCIA Adapter Card

USB 2.0 Adapter PCMCIA Cardbus

The auctions end on Sunday morning, October 23.

Yesterday (to be more accurate, at 1214 GMT on October 17, which would put it at yesterday morning) we had a full moon. You can see it in the center of the above photo, shot last night at Sunset Ridge, loking east over the basin where some of the Arlington Aces were practicing.

This was taken this morning atop the Vail Street Garage, looking west.

Liz Phair has a new album out. And on the cover she's looking down her nose again.

Frankly, I've seen enough of this lady's nostrils and upper lip for one lifetime.

Here's a link to a web site by a guy at Northern Michigan University who built a Sears Tower sculpture out of Jenga blocks.

Wow. I can almost see myself looking out the window.

Be sure to check out this page to see the work in progress by the artist. And in November, there's going to be a "Sears Tower as a bowling pin" fundraiser.

Tonight we saw Lon Chaney in the original 1925 silent film version of Phantom of the Opera with accompaniment by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The performance took place at Symphony Center and was a wonderful experience. This is the way movies were meant to be seen.

The film tells the story more as a horror tale, not as the overwrought romance Andrew Lloyd Webber would have us want it. (Apologies to Phantom fangirls in the audience. :-)

Modern film audiences tend to be spoiled by the flash and boom of the current crop of Hollywood movies (ask Dan upstairs about this), which seem to be focused on making you, the viewer, feel like you're right there in the middle of the action. Silent film is a different experience altogether: you know it's a performance because it's this flat black-and-white image on a screen and it doesn't look like real life, and the sound in the theater is meant to draw an emotion instead of replicating the actual audio of The Rock blasting someone's whatever off.

Phantom of the Opera used some early silent film techniques, such as different color stock for inside, outside, and underground scenes and even an early use of Technicolor for the Grand Ball scene.

Despite its lack of Foley artists, this Phantom of the Opera is very creepy. Lon Chaney's tortured Opera House-dweller is more menacing on grainy celluloid, and Mary Philbin plays a Christine that you can actually care about.

The CSO played an adaptation of the original score by G Hinrichs and M Winkler. The conductor was Richard Kaufman, and the organist was Dennis James, whom I've heard playing at the Silent Film Society of Chicago's presentations. A wonderful touch was soprano Elizabeth Norman, providing voices for both Christine and Carlotta, along with the occasional scream.

The program started out with Mr Kaufman's telling us that the movie we were about to see was made 6 years after "a very important event." He then introduced Chicago White Sox organist Nancy Faust, who played a rendition of "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" followed by "Go-Go White Sox."

Who says an evening at the symphony is stuffy?

Lisa's brother got tickets for us to see Blues Traveler at the Barrymore Theatre in Madison on Saturday night. The thing about these guys that amazes me is that each "song" is actually a 20-minute set of songs, and their playing never lost its energy.

The opening act was a group called Carbon Leaf, who were also great. Their music (and lead singer) reminded me a lot of R.E.M., but I'll leave it to a real R.E.M. fan to offer her opinions on that. They sounded good enough for me to pick up their latest CD at the show.

This was a great way to cap off a day that saw a big Badgers football win.

"Win Or Die Trying"-- those were fans in the bleachers at the White Sox-Mariners game we saw last August. It looks like the White Sox won.

Today's quote comes courtesy of Scott Podsednik.

Our intention last night was to walk over to Harry's or Peggy's to watch the game, but once we got settled in with an order from Chipotle we were pretty much glued to the TV. When the last out was called, there was yelling above us and fireworks blasting in the street.

Yes, it was a long time coming, but at last we have a winning baseball team in this town. Somewhere, Harry Caray is walking between towers of empty Falstaff cups, singing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame..."

Big homecoming parade tomorrow for the Sox. Tune in for an update.

The White Sox had a motorcade from US Cellular Field to the north end of the Loop today. Here's Ozzie Guillen at the front of one of the buses.

This was the first ticker-tape parade I've ever seen, and it was very cool. Here's the sky with a couple people on top of the LaSalle Bank Building tossing bagfuls of confetti (the picture is small, but trust me, they're there):

The morning was pretty cloudy, but by the time the Sox made it to LaSalle Street the sky had turned clear and blue.

I've heard several estimates of how many people were there (1.5 million was the last count). All I know is I personally saw hundreds just passing between the Sears Tower and the corner of Adams and Wells.

The parade ended with a rally next to the Chicago River. The crowds only grew thicker as we went north, so I went back to the office. :-)

It was a great day to welcome home the hometown winners.

Here's Lisa's contribution to the holiday, Scooter the Pumpkin.

Becky's creation was accessorized with glitter.

Here's Emma outside Westgate's annual Halloween parade. It was a nice day today, although it was spookily overcast. By 6:00 it was drizzling, but the kids managed to collect a good share of candy.

Happy Halloween!