Oh, eight days till 08-08-08

The Olympics start next week, and I don't know if it's just me, but there seems to be less excitement about this year's games than any other one I can remember. Aside from wall-to-wall coverage of Baltimore's own Michael Phelps (highly recommend article in the NYT's Play magazine today), and lots of handwringing about China's human rights blah blah blah and some stuff about Iraq's team blah blah blah, I'm not feeling the fervor that usually accompanies an Olympic year.

Although, in what must be a sign that the Olympics can still command attention for all the right reasons, the stream of news about drug-related suspensions started today.

I guess I'll try to watch Phelps' races, some track and, if the TV schedule is decent, some men's basketball. And maybe the end of the marathon, to see if it's possible for humans to run 26.2 while breathing greenish-brown air. But otherwise, I'm sort of eh.

What about you? Any interest? More or less than usual?

Notes for my screenplay, part 1

Pound for pound, my favorite line from a movie was in The Godfather: Part II. During a party for Hyman Roth, on a veranda (I know, just go with me) in Havana, a waiter brings Roth a piece of birthday cake. In the midst of a discussion about mob business, and without breaking conversational stride, Roth gets in an aside to the waiter: "Smaller piece."

Completely unnecessary in terms of the plot, but what a great touch of realism and character.

Now, I have no intention of ever writing a screenplay. But I've always thought it might be a good idea to keep track of strange bits of dialogue I overhear so I could throw bits like that into the script that I'm not planning to write.

Luckily, I just picked up a good one.

I'm walking back from lunch and a woman I've never seen before stops me. It's obvious she's going to ask me what time it is, so I start lifting my left arm toward my face.

"Hey, could you pick a number between 10 and 100?"
Wha?
"Seventy-four," I say.
"Oh! Good!" She seems pleasantly surprised. "Alright - pick another one."
How can I lose? "Thirty-six."
She looks disappointed. "Eh, OK."

I have no idea what it meant, but maybe I'll find a way to use it.

This also reminded me of my most memorable random overheard dialogue from the years I spent in in Oz. I'm not sure how well it translates into print - I actually do a pretty spot-on impression of the speaker - but here it is:

Down-and-out older guy walking down the avenue, carrying on a heated conversation with himself. Very loud: "I cain't drink." Then louder: "But I can smoke!"

Kids, take your pick: Your favorite line from a movie or favorite random overheard comment?

Word to my mother, or The neutrality of nitrites

One of my summer jobs during the high school years was at a hospital clinic. I won't say where it was, but the city was at the time the teenage pregnancy capital of the nation. (Which made for some sweet t-shirts for the tourists.)

The best part of the job was that it yielded a very memorable phrase, uttered by a very large dude (he was a patient's relative, so what's the right term? customer? guest? client?) who was irate about having to wait for so long, or maybe it was a Medicaid billing issue or the utter lack of a functional air conditioner on a day when it was probably 100 degrees with 3000 percent humidity. Whatever. Anyway, after getting into it with one of the employees, he pounded his fist on the counter and yelled, "I'm tired of this shit-ass bullshit." (I added the hyphen.)

I'm sure I hadn't heard anyone else use that phrase before - and I haven't heard anyone other than myself and Howard say it since. It was beautiful.

That's a very long setup to get to the point, which is that the second best part of the job was that there was a hot dog cart about 30 steps away from the clinic's front door. (I can't swear that it was a Model 325, but it looked a lot like this one.)

This, of course, meant that when it was time for lunch, my only decisions was: One hot dog or two?

My mom was none too pleased with this seemingly unhealthful lunch diet. She said then, and has repeated numerous times since, that the nitrites from all of those weiners unquestionably stunted my growth. Her theory is that I deprived myself of the three or four inches in height that might have made it a cinch for me to make the high school basketball squad. Maybe she's right.

Or... OR!... maybe not. John Tierney, or as I like to call him, Saint John Tierney, has in today's NYT a list of 10 things that we might not need to worry so much about. One is the dietary properties of hot dogs. He dismisses the "nitrite scare" out of hand. And then goes on: "If you must worry, focus on the carbs in the bun. But when it comes to the fatty frank — or the fatty anything else on vacation — I’d relax."

There are other interesting tidbits, including the assertion that paper grocery bags are no better for the environment than plastic ones - I guess the optimist spin on that would be that plastic bags aren't as bad as we thought? - and that when it comes to saving gas while driving on the highway, no difference between using the a/c and opening the windows.

I'm more relaxed already. You?

Quake! update

A few random thoughts, post-quake:

1) In some weird way, it's nice that this at least made top-of-the-page news all over the place. Here's the New York Times story, which downgrades it to a somewhat less sexy 5.4 quake. And for posterity, here's a shot of the CNN home page, which gives us the exciting, but still ridiculous "Live breaking news" banner. Repeated memo to CNN: It's not breaking news anymore. It's already been broken. Get over yourself.

And, also for posterity, I guess, here's a shot of the L.A. Times home page, which illustrated the magnitude of the quake by showing that a lot of paper towels fell. Oh, the humanity!

2) First person who contacted me after the shaking stopped was the ultrawonderful Loree (holla!), who heard about it within minutes thanks to Twitter. I'll have to get into this subject more another time, but other than notifying friends about natural disasters - for which it apparently works beautifully - I don't get the attraction of Twitter. But it was still good to hear from Loree - let's not lose sight of that fact.

3) The quake was another reminder of how much Sprint blows. I don't know if it's really fair to blame Sprint for this, but I will anyway: It was 32 minutes before I was able to make a call on my cell phone. And nothing bad actually happened in my part of town.

4) Apparently this was nothing to the natives. I walked through town during my lunch break, and it was if nothing had happened - nobody was talking about it. Well, maybe these suckers are laid back out here.

OK, back to work.

Quake!

Well, kids, just felt my first earthquake.

It sort of felt like the floor was rolling under me a little - only lasted about 5 seconds, but I didn't care for it very much. I know we're supposed to get under our desks when that happens, but it didn't occur to me to actually do that until officemate reminded me, by which time the whole thing was over.

Luckily, we have our I-can't-imagine-it'd actually-be-useful employer-supplied earthquake emergency kits. They have boxes of water and, like, flashlights or some crap. And they come in a cute little blue backpack. But I seriously think they're missing something, like helmets.

The details are here, but apparently it was a 5.8 magnitude quake near Chino Hills, which is about 45 miles from here.

Great. Some dude from across the hall just came over and told us about all the seismic activity happening on the Pacific Rim lately. Thanks, jackass.

Well, at least the weather here still rocks.

Come, uh, hover with me

I was all ready to add "jetpack" to my Amazon wish list - even though I've had a Segway on there for about seven years and nobody's bought that for me - but then I read the New York Times article about the latest iteration of the personal flying machine. Eh, not so exciting.

Even less exciting when you watch the 55-second video (a few scrolls down on the left). There are a few seconds when the camera is trained a few feet above the guy's head - presumably he also was waiting for the contraption to get up off the ground more than a few inches. I know they didn't want to kill the reporter who was testing it out, but still - let the thing go a little bit!

Then, it occurred to me: If you have really big news about something other than denim overalls, you're probably not doing your presser in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Cuil down period

When your brand is the de facto term for the product or service you're selling, it's gotta be darn near impossible for competitors to dent the market. I'd guess that even more so than Kleenex or Coke, Google has become the term for its product. Has anyone in the last 10 years said they'd "conduct an online search"?

That's why I was interested to read about Cuil (pronounced "cool," apparently), a new search engine designed to compete with Google. Story is that it was launched by a husband-and-wife team who fled Google. Guess they're not going to the alumni reunion this year, huh?

Although the Times tech guy didn't like it much, I think the search results look kinda cool and organized, and when I Cuiled myself (less gross than Googling oneself?) it did better than Google at finding stuff I've written recently and posting it higher in the list.

But if you're launching a search engine that is supposed to compete with Google, you'd, uh, better make sure that on the day your p.r. hits the papers, this doesn't happen:

What are the odds Google employees created a program to crash Cuil's servers? Nah.