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October 01, 2005

Of Assimilated Negroes, Cabbages and Kings

The thing that you should not first do is start reading this negro and not finish the wonderful post I am about to write. After all he did call my blog poop. Not intentionally, but he should have known that it would get back to me. Such is the uncanny claustrophobia of the Kwaku Network. Sooner or later you get to meet everyone except Zadie Smith. Oh why didn't I meet Zadie Smith?

On the other hand I can't blame you if you do want to sneak a peek over thataway because I've been a serious dorkwad for too long over here. Katrina sucked most of the humor out of me and I've been working too many 12 hour days. Plus a friend of mine has disappeared, or just kind of gone to that place where all friends who drift apart go - into the zone of civilized nonchalance. If I see my friend again, I'm sure to get a handshake. Big Whoop. And so for a plurality of reasons (Oh snap, I owe Ambra a happy birthday and an essay on pluralism) it's all coming to a close, but I don't know if it will be glorious or not. 'It' being the dreary outlook and lack of comics.

I've been thinking about my BMW again. It has been a long time since I've driven my own beemer and I'm starting to become frumpy again. I can tell. I haven't worn the Hollywood Suit in months and I haven't had a good straight razor shave in a coon's age. I can feel the biorythmic convergence coming - it's just around the corner, the day when my phone rings off the hook from people I actually want to speak to.

Yet tonight, spending the first weekend away from the crib in memory, I'm catching up on my blogging only to find myself getting sucked into discussions which are beneath me. So I wander around the 'sphere and discover that I haven't updated my Blogger profile - not that I really care, but now that I have Audioscrobbler / LastFM, I really can answer with some accuracy what my favorite music is. This time I actually remember my favorite books too, and most of them are fiction. I discover that I need the edification of a good fiction, and I haven't had one since Baudolino, which was a good two years ago. Tsk.

So there's Martin Amis, whose latest adventures left me dead flat, and there's his Wikipedia page which cite him as influencing Zadie Smith and Will Self. It turns out that Will Self's 'Great Apes' was a smashingly great book - and I felt that I would get in trouble for liking it, yet I read this for Amis:

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He is the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."

Fuckin' A! That's where I'm at. I've gone all political and lost my sense of humor but not of the absurd. It's got me bending my ear towards Hitchens instead of Amis. And what about my old buddy T. Boyle? Maybe he's got something up his sleeve that's not entirely to cynical. But then there's Zadie. Zadie Zadie Zadie. I don't know why I wait so long. I haven't read an inch of her, I just collapsed at her photo. Well, who wouldn't? All the cretins I'm sweeping off my porch that's who. And it's no wonder Memer isn't posting here so often.

Anyway, I have the rest of this weekend to make a supercomputer jump through the appropriate hoops. As enticing as that sounds (I've time-travelled a memory of an earlier me into the present just to show me how much we've progressed) on the whole I'd rather be curled up with a good..Zadie. But that life has been cast aside. The good news is that my boy made the football team. I should be home for that but that too will come in due time.

In the meantime, we ought to spend a bit more time sending hostile subliminal messages to Hugo Chavez instead of beating up on Bill Bennett. I haven't felt rogueish enough lately, but am feeling more and more certain that my uppity elitism needs some sharpening. Perhaps I can find a good P.J. O'Rourke at Borders tomorrow before I check out the new Cronenberg. Oh wait. I've got that damned supercomputer thing to do.

I named the big one Potter and the little one Hagid. We're running benchmarks from Snape. Potter is a temperamental one, doesn't like my 32bit text editor and won't synch IDs from my database to the Deployment Server, so that when the applets go a-calling, they get rejected out of hand. But Potter hasn't given me a real fit like Hagid did this evening. Three tests. One gives 40% errors I can't explain. The next one goes flawlessly. Then I change one little parameter and the whole craptard goes zombie. This, ladies and gentlemen is why NT sucks, no matter how hefty the hardware. I've got 300 databases running simultaneously and the agent freezes. Can I kill the zombies all at once? Noooooo. NT has no such animal as a kill -9 (the lung ripper). It just sits there and divvies up the full weight of 8 3GHz Xeons burning 100% across 300 processes that I've got to kill one by frikken one. With a mouse and four clicks. Warning, killing this process may cause system instability. Are you sure?

Anyway. Next time I'll keep Load Runner throttled and not try to launch 300 databases all in the same second. Lesson learned.

Monday night I had a way-too-expensive dinner. It looked like a fairly ordinary upscale steakhouse, but I underestimated. The cheapest a la cart entree was 29 bucks, a fairly decent prime rib. And wait, they didn't even have anything as low class as Pellegrino. The waiter is doing this elaborate dance in refilling my glass with sparkling water that comes in a container that looks like a cross between a bank vacuum canister and a lava lamp. I order the oyster appetizer for 12 bucks. I get these tiny things that are the size of quarters in a chopped up bed of seaweed and tiny diced tomato on a platter the size of Venus. I must be in California.

So the rest of the week I use my suite hotel to my advantage. I went grocery shopping. I picked up a package of clams, two bottles of Powerade, some beef jerky, a couple cans of corn, some Zatarains, some Rice a Roni, a bag of frozen shrimp scampi in fettucini, frozen mixed vegetables, a bottle of Sutter Home White Zinfandel, a half gallon of whole fat milk (whoohoo!) a dozen Krispy Kreme glazed, a bowl of heat & eat clam chowder, and one box each of popcorn shrimp and breaded clam strips. I couldn't find any decent maki and I forgot to get some lox, but I did get a fourpack of Red Bull. All told $60.

It turns out that the breaded seafood shouldn't be microwaved, so I ended up at Wendy's tonight. I swear.

It took talking with my colleague to discover that I really do count Creole cuisine among my favorites. My mother didn't truly enjoy cooking for the lot of us brats, surely we made it more of an industrial chore than a gourmet experience for her. But when she did throw down the down home cooking - lookout. So I guess I'll always love red beans and rice. That's for Saturday night, if I get out of the lab before 9pm.

That's the news from 95014. See ya.

Posted by mbowen at October 1, 2005 12:37 AM

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Posted by: memer at October 1, 2005 11:04 AM