June 13, 2006

Note to Self

Note to self:
Never buy a trackball with an easily removeable ball ever ever ever again.

I think I spend more time with the ball removed and spinning it on the funky mousepad than I do actually using it. Sure, it gives me greater control than my Gateway mouse. Sure, it's more ergonomic. But boy, is it a great toy to roll around the desk. And spin without letting it leave the mousepad (and thus make loads of noise). Or to occasionally bounce when no one else is in the office.

I wonder if I could replace it with a superball ... you know those really big superballs in the vending machines for a dollar. Hrm. I think I have one of those at home ... I'll have to bring that in and test this new theory out.

Yeah, so I'm thinking maybe I need to go back to the doctor and see about some ADHD meds again ... *sigh*.

Posted by Red Monkey at 1:24 PM | Comments (4) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | TrackBack | Stumble

Get Off My Lawn

I posted last week that I'd had a great post idea on Thursday and then promptly forgotten it. Well, after hanging out in the shoutbox at Blogmad (again) the other day, Capn Platy reminded me what it was.

Back in 2001, I lived in the 'hood. I was just a few blocks south of Notre Dame, but it was SO the 'hood. Little known tidbit (unless you know a lot about gangs or about South Bend, Chicago and Detroit): South Bend, Indiana, is considered a halfway point between Chicago and Detroit by the Crips and the Bloods. And probably other gangs and I don't really wanna know more about it. Suffice it to say, there's a lot of gang activity around here. And, in 2001, we had a crack house across the street from us and a whorehouse back behind us. In fact, early that summer, I was standing outside talking to my elderly next-door-neighbor when we heard a commotion. A lady started running down the alleyway, barefoot, barely clothed ... and a somewhat more fully dressed man was half-heartedly chasing her. Before I could spring into action (forgetting momentarily that I'm not a superhero and that my other half would kick my behind if she knew what I was planning), my neighbor put a hand on my arm and said, "That's one of those whores from the house behind you."

I blinked rapidly. The man saw us watching, and resignedly walked back and let the woman go.

With my spidey-senses no longer tingling, I relaxed and looked at my neighbor in shock. "Whorehouse?" Who says 83 year old women are not observant? I'd totally missed it. I mean, I was really tired of people parking in the alleyway behind our house, but I completely missed the fact that it was only men ... lots of different men ... and that they were all visiting the same house. Where there were lots of women apparently living. Oh. Yeah. Huh.

The crack house across the street was more obvious, even to me. Something about the red light in the porch on some evenings and the green light on other evenings. And then there were the green light conversations that went something like this:
"Man, you gotta go into the alleyway ... can't sell out here on the street."

That particular crackhouse did not last long. It was, of course, replaced by another one later.

So all of this is to set up just exactly what kind of neighborhood I lived in at that time. A bit rough. So when I say the neighborhood children were not scared of much, you have some idea what I mean. One of the women who lived in the house behind us, regularly had her children climb our fence to cut through our yard. I don't know why. If you went down just one more house, you were at the corner and didn't need to cut through anyone's yard. And our fence was not easy to climb, either. It was decorative wire ... too sturdy to bend easily ... not sturdy enough to climb like chain link. Too high for an adult to step over. After a few weeks of this, the fence was finally beginning to droop and I eventually had to take it down.

Unfortunately, after that, the neighborhood kids thought playing around our dinky, crappy little shed was fun. It made me nervous because our landlord had moved that rickety thing from who knows where and just kind of plopped it on the property. It was seriously falling apart. I'd already gone out a few times and tried to shore up falling supports and replaced a few slabs of walls, but I always thought a good wind would knock that sucker right over.

So the kids are playing tag around this rickety thing and I can just see it: the freaking shed falls on one of them and the whole neighborhood comes after us.

Now, I'd yelled at the kids to "GET OFF MY LAWN" so to speak, a few times before. To very little avail.

But in the spring of 2001, I was undergoing the ESHAP chemo protocol in preparation for a bone marrow transplant. And I'd lost most of my hair. And shaved my head because I really am not very vain, but watching your hair fall out in chunks is just NOT a fun process.

On a whim, I opened the backdoor, removed my now ever-present ballcap and screamed in my deepest, most authoritative, "scary" voice:
"YOU KIDS GET AWAY FROM THAT SHED RIGHT NOW!"

Hehehehehe. They paled. They freaked.

I took a step out onto the tiny cement back porch.
"I DON'T EVER WANNA CATCH YOU BACK HERE AGAIN, YOU HEAR ME?"

And I took a second step out to the yard.

They flew.

Was the only time the neighborhood kids ever listened to me. Even if I did feel a bit like Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace.

Apparently bald white women screaming out their back porch is utterly terrifying to the fear-less children of the local gangs. Who knew?

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:10 AM | Comments (4) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | TrackBack | Stumble

June 11, 2006

Alligators and Gorillas

So, there's a whole silly reason that I call this blog Red Monkey, but of course, one of the reasons I wanted the red monkey, was because I do adore monkeys and gorillas both. So tonight, as I was watching Growing Up Gorilla on the Discovery Channel, I remembered my trip to the Brookfield Zoo and the pictures I got of a new gorilla mommy.

The best part of the show was watching four little guys playing together. The one male of the group, second to youngest of them all, decided he was a silverback already. Posturing and pulling all the others to the ground, even the one several, several months older and much bigger. Once he'd decided he'd dominated them, he went to the electric fence that separated them from the toddler gorilla-kids, he kept trying to get through the fence to prove himself king of the big kids too!

Ahh, gotta love the politics of the playground. I can remember when I wished there was an electric fence to keep the bullies away from the younger kids, too. In fact, there are times on the internet when I still wish the same thing, what with people not conversing in comments left on other blogs, but instead just spitting insults and venom. And no, I'm not talking about here ... somehow, at least up to this point, I've managed to avoid any trolls or venemous spitting comments, but I've witnessed it on the blogs of many other people. I never do understand it ... it always makes me think of junior high.

In fact, back, waaaaay back when I was in junior high and the abacus had only recently been tossed in favour of some funky hand held device that weighed about 6 pounds and could add, subtract, multiply AND divide!!! (all on one single 9 volt per every 100 calculations) ... anyhow, back in the day, the rage was Lacoste Izod shirts. These were the little three-button shirts with a collar. Sometimes called a polo. Sometimes called a golf shirt. Well, there were Izods back then and then there were just plain shirts. The Izod had the little alligator and was thus considered cool. The reason why is lost in the mysteries of time and the brains of the then pre-adolescents. Everyone wanted that stupid alligator on their shirt.

I just thought those shirts in general were the height of cool. Obviously, they were dress-up shirts because they had a COLLAR. And, still, they were t-shirts. Casual and dress-up all in one package!!! I loved them.

I really didn't care if they were plain, had the alligator or the Sears Le Tigre tiger on them. Whatever.

However, most of my classmates were terribly rabid about the Izod alligator. Oh, you weren't made fun of for wearing a plain 3-button. But you certainly weren't "in" if you did that.

Of course, as soon as I hit seventh grade and junior high, my mother decides this is the perfect time to pick up sewing. And she proceeded to infinitely increase my cool factor by making most of my clothes. It's not that she was bad at sewing, but her taste in materials left much to be desired. At any rate, in my perpetual attempt to make fun of my classmates for being slaves to stupid things, I found a nifty -- and quite large -- alligator applique whilst whiling away the interminable hours at the fabric store. Mom was looking for the cheapest cloth and the best cloth: a search continually doomed to failure, so she usually chose cheap. (I'm surprised we didn't have shirts made out of that funky white crap that I can't remember the name of ... edging? no ... whatever.)

I bounded over to my mother with this freaking three inch alligator and announced that I wanted THAT on one of my shirts. My mother looked at me sadly. Obviously I was a challenged child in terms of spatial relations and she said tenderly, "Honey, no one is ever going to think that's an Izod alligator."

I rolled my eyes in the fashion of teens and pre-teens everywhere. "I KNOW, Mom, that's the POINT."

She reluctantly purchased my joke alligator and dutifully sewed it on one of the shirts.

All I heard that day at school was "That's not a real Izod you know."

To which my reply was a big grin and a delighted, "I know ... that's the point."

There were a LOT of confused kids in my school the first few times I wore the shirt.

But, the saddest thing to me was that while I got a lot of confusion over that shirt, I never did get teased. On the other hand, "Donna" wasn't so lucky. She couldn't afford an Izod. Her mom got her the next best thing, at least in Mom-Think. Donna got a Le Tigre shirt instead. She spent an evening getting the tiger off that shirt and then, skipped athletics one morning and took an alligator off some unsuspecting girl's Izod. She tried to glue it onto her shirt.

Watching the gorilla kids on the tv show tonight reminded me very much of that scene in the girl's locker room in the 80s. A pack of girls, converging on Donna. Yelling at her. Screaming, "That's not an Izod, you faker!" And other, less nice, things. Donna, frightened, insisting that it was. Truly, it was an Izod. She tried to divert attention to me, reminding the girls I had a HUGE alligator. They were tearing at Donna's shirt now, trying to get to the tag on the inside back. Donna was squriming, terrified, trying to get away.

All she'd wanted was to fit in.

All I'd wanted was to let the other kids know you didn't have to fit in.

I got ignored.

Donna got her shirt literally ripped off. And the tag held up triumphantly. Le Tigre.

The coach had to find her a shirt from the lost and found. Luckily, there were some just back from the laundry.

In the show tonight, the slightly bigger toddler gorillas were picking on the littlest one. Something that wouldn't really happen in the wild, according to the researchers, because the older adolescents and the adults wouldn't stand for it. But in this habitat, they get groups of babies, not the adults. So the humans sometimes have to just let the "kids" sort it out for themselves ... sometimes they have to step in.

What is it in us, that makes us go after the weak or those we perceive to be weak? Is it a throw back to some more survivalist instincts in which only the strongest survived and if you killed off the weak, it was more food and survival for you?

I hear some folks, adults, talk about this phenomenon with disgust for the weak. I've heard others talk about with hurt and confusion. Others with a determination to fix it all.

For me, it was in junior high that I realized that this behaviour the adults called "junior high" was prevalent everywhere. I saw adults being just that petty as to be asinine over what brand of clothes someone wore. What neighborhood they "chose" to live in.

And all I could think ... all I can think ... is our need to not be alone really that strong? That this is one of the largest worries in so many people's lives in the western world? (I presume it's the world over, but I don't know other cultures well enough to presume to speak for them.)

Schoolyard bullies. Proving strength like the young gorillas. Proving they're cool like Cordelia in the early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Proving we're still essentially animals despite our insistence that we're civilised.

Wow. This post took some turns I didn't expect.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:51 PM | Comments (3) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | TrackBack | Stumble

June 1, 2006

Airsoft Update

In the spirit of continuing the airsoft experiments, my supervisor yesterday was intensely curious. After all, the graphic designer had now been shot, I'd shot myself ... he wanted to know ... just how bad it hurt. So the graphic designer, upon invitation, shot him in the calf.

He opens his mouth to say, "That doesn't really -- OW!" He looked somewhat shocked. "Doesn't hurt at first, but after!"

Now the only person in the room who hasn't been shot directly, insists that enough experimentation has been done and he feels no burning desire to find out for himself how it truly feels. Ricochet shots and our example is apparently enough for him.

So, the experimentation has moved on. We've discovered that, sadly, airsoft does not penetrate Play-Doh effigies. It will knock over the Star Wars Galactic Heroes StormTrooper, but not Darth Vader. Apparently the force is still strong with that one.

It also leaves small dents in the wall behind the targets.

Particularly if you use a battery operated rapid fire pistol, you can tear a business card to shreds. Or, you can simply catch it just right and knock it to the floor.

You cannot do more than a tiny dent in a coke can, which is sad.

You can "take out" the Star Wars Death Star Pez dispenser, however. Even better is when you angle it just right so that you take out both Grievous AND the Death Star all with one shot.

Of course, after all of this, you then have to rummage through the room looking for little green plastic BBs which have mysteriously, in the manner of toys everywhere, multiplied far beyond the original number.

Several people have asked now where in the world I could possibly work that would allow me to not only have toys all over my cube, but not throw a screaming fit about firing off an airsoft pistol in the office. Well, I'm part of an online company's creative department. You know, advertising and such. So between being one of the "creatives" and being a part of the geeky web coders, the toys are actually kinda normal. The airsoft is a bit more unusual, but just about everyone comes down here to use it now.

One day, I am determined, Darth Vader shall fall to a sparkling green BB shot. One day.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:57 AM | Comments (2) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | TrackBack | Stumble

May 26, 2006

Vinyl Update

So other than me not paying attention (No! Imagine that!) and recording most of this album in one channel instead of two, I think the digitizing of my records is going quite well. I've converted a piece of one of my favourite Goofy Gold songs to an MP3 (smaller than an AIFF) for you to listen to. So, remember that I forgot to check 2 channels (left and right) and that I have only done the most basic cleanup on this. Pretty good for a song recorded in analog in 1959 or so.

Click here for a snippet of Johnny Horton's "Battle of New Orleans."

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:01 AM | Comments (1) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | TrackBack | Stumble

May 25, 2006

Vinyl

I have a handful of Vinyl left ... some things that I either can't replace on CD, haven't gotten around to replacing yet ... or hold some sentimental value for me. For example, those of you old enough to remember, that is, I have a few records which have photos as part of the vinyl ... the prime one is 2 LPs from Ralph Bakshi's rendition of Lord of the Rings with some of the artwork from the movie.

I also have a record that my grandmother got me ... waaaay back in the day. Her story is that she saw a commercial on tv, and she just knew that this record was for me. She was so right! After getting for my birthday, well, let's just say I'm very surprised I didn't completely wear the thing out. It's full of old novelty songs ... "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor" ... "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" ... "Ahab the Arab" ... "Running Bear" ... "Purple People Eater" ... "General Custer" ... and many many more (I can just hear the K-Tel announcer now).

So, I was reading my copy of MacAddict the other day (actually a few months ago) and I ran across a quickie review of this little beauty:

Yeah, that's right. A record player that connects directly to your computer through the USB port. With software compatible for Mac, WinDoze and Linux.

I finally received mine yesterday after having it on order for about five months now and I have to say, it was really worth the wait. The software is Open Source software from SourceForge (Audacity, if you're interested) and while the documentation with the turntable was not great, the software did a wonderful job.

So, I snagged my Goofy Gold album and recorded one side of one of the records last night ... without any clean up at all, the sound was pretty decent. "Monster Mash" was a little fuzzy, but that could honestly have been the fault of the record or the recording that I had. "Running Bear" came out nice and clean. Others will follow and I might try to put up a sound bite from one of the songs later this week to give you an idea of the quality. Right now I'm just excited to finally get to listen to some of these songs again!

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:37 AM | Comments (3) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | TrackBack | Stumble