June 4, 2008: Spelling bee nostalgia

Apparently the National Spelling Bee was televised relatively recently. I still wonder why I don't watch it on TV. You'd think I would, considering I was in it. Oh. Right. Segue time.

This was back in The Spelling Bee is sponsored by Scripps, as you know. As sponsors go, it could be much worse; after all, it isn't, say, the Brawndo Bee yet. So it's organized through newspapers, and ours did indeed participate. I'd tried to get there in the sixth grade, but screwed up "querulous." Seventh grade, I actually got there. Now for crunch time.

Crunch time is where you hear media reports of academic stage moms pushing their children to study. I didn't have an academic stage mom. The way it works was that before the regionals, you get the colorful miniature Paideia booklets to review, with its cute themes and such. (I may have my memory wrong, but I think several of these themes got recycled from year to year.) When you pass the regionals, you get a bigger book to review. Sure, I reviewed, but not fanatically.

I was never televised. The way it worked when I was there, there was one preliminary round to weed people out. Then there was one written round. The talk of the place was that most people were inordinately scared of this written round. I don't see why, personally; when writing a word, there's often this intuitive sense that it looks wrong. Maybe it's practice. I know that when reading a paper, I can get this nagging sense that I just skimmed over an error, and I usually did. It's useful for things like copy editing, and written spelling tests. Every time I got eliminated, it was due to pronunciation issues. But more on that later.

After the written test, assuming you passed (I forget the exact score you needed), the rounds proceed as normal. This is when they started filming. They don't show the entire bee, though; commercial breaks and such happen. My turns both fell during one of these commercial breaks, and I didn't last very long.

This is where you start questioning whether I'm making stuff up. I'm not. You can verify it for yourself if you want. My words, in order:

Round 1: "nociceptor."
Round 2: Written. I don't remember the words that were on the test.
Round 3: "perstringe."
Round 4: "seston," which got me eliminated. It looks like such an easy word, right? I know why I did it, too. The definition's related to seawater, which made me think of "cesspool." In my defense, lots of other people lost out at this point; enough to make this, technically, 26th place. Sounds a lot more impressive than "round four," right? No, I'm not meaning to brag. Apologies again if it comes off that way.

What was more interesting than the actual televised events, in my memory at least, was the "behind the scenes" stuff. My memory is alternatively vague and detailed here. I'll do my best.

There were 250 people in this thing. Middle schoolers. To be honest, it felt a little bit like a summer camp, without the outdoors or archery lessons or canoeing or horseback riding or other summer camp-esque activities. So you did have, if not cliques, then groups of people who tended to spend more time together. You had the kids who probably were the "popular kids" back home. You had the ones who looked thirty even in middle school. There were the friendly extroverts who went up and greeted everybody. I can identify a lot of them by name. There were yearbooks to help, but more on that later.

You had several events. Since it was held in Washington D. C., of course, there was the typical sightseeing. (Also, because this was held in Washington, D.C., you did see your share of crazies. The count for my trip: one public urinator, and one guy who loudly muttered "Pancakes! Assholes!" while passing my family on the street. This has since become a family inside joke.) I got over my phobia of escalators when I was there. Before, I couldn't even ride an escalator since I had fallen down one as a child. The constant flood of them - it WAS a city - cured me quite quickly.

Then there were the social events. Some of these were informal. It was held in a hotel, so a few people congregated in the lounge. This is where I fell into my particular group. This all culminated in what was basically a middle school dance. (Just like summer camp, again!) Segue time, again.

I attended a LOT of middle school dances in my day. I can't imagine what they're like now, but I do have memories:

- Literal middle school dances. These were held in the gym. I went to a K-8 and by middle school, our average class size was 8 thanks to people flocking to public schools. Most of these consisted of my trying to convince the DJ to play A*Teens songs, and failing miserably. (Speaking of the A*Teens, I shouldn't be so surprised at the sort of things their solo careers consist of: one early-Britney clone, one song named "Glamour Bitch," one Aaron Carter-esque rapper, and one earnest Jesse McCartney-lite singer-songwriter. Yes, I spent an hour or so researching this. No, I didn't purchase anything.)

- Camp dances. Oh man. This is a particularly rich streak of angst to mine. All of them were themed, which basically meant I wore a lot of homemade felt pink poodle skirts. My 12-year-old fumbles at middle school summer camp romance! My first, ridiculously gaudy attempt at applying way too much makeup, for which I think I should spend a lifetime compensating. One camp crush on a boy in one of my "classes" which ended in my watching him dance with a girl in tight stretch denim capris. The time I was set up, which was awkward, but comparatively good compared to the time I thought it would be a good idea to go up to a group of boys and ask them - collectively - if any of them wanted to be my date for the dance. Yes. Cringe. CRINGE, damn it! I'm cringing. (It ended up with my being stood up. No surprises there.) For historical reference, the slow-dance song of choice was "I Turn To You" by Christina Aguilera (who wasn't - and isn't - that bad...)

- And then, the spelling bee. This one was held in the hotel ballroom. There were two of them. One of them was 'traditional'. I don't remember many of the songs played, except that Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" was one of them. The other one had karaoke, which I enthusiastically participated in (the song: "Case of the Ex" by Mya.) Perhaps a bit too enthusiastically, in retrospect.

When it was over, you had...yearbook signing! Just like summer camp AND school! This went pretty much how every camp farewell signing goes. Lots of exchanges of e-mail, AIM, etc, some follow up. I wish I had kept the yearbook. It'd be a more solid souvenir than my memories.

So there you have it. If I remember more details, I will edit.

~*~*~

Albums from 2008 that I want to buy:

Martina Topley-Bird - The Blue God. Her older album has been on my To Buy List for quite some time, and this looks like it might be even better.

Kay Hanley - Weaponize. I've gushed about the preview tracks before, and this is finally here!

Thea Gilmore - Liejacker, solely because I've heard great things about it.

Veda Hille - This Riot Life. This has been on the list for too long.

~*~*~

Gas prices! We all have something to say. Personally, I wish people would channel their energies away from Facebook boycotts and towards, you know, using less gas. At the very least, you will pay less.

Since prices keep rising, this might seem counterintuitive, and probably is, but I only buy about $10 at a time. My reasoning is that when I have a quarter tank or less left, psychologically I have more incentive to use less and drive more efficiently. My car has a MPG calculator. I don't know how accurate it is (probably not very) but at least it's something. It makes me very aware of how much I accelerate. Turning off the engine is something more difficult to get used to, and less practical. I tried it today in the drive-through pharmacy line. Tip: If you forget to put the car in park, you have to make up for it.

May 29, 2008: An organization day

This time, I'm not doing online organization, but offline. Today is my first day off from my job so I figured I might as well do something useful with it.

First order of business: liner notes. I bought a silver Hallmark gift box for this purpose. It's big enough for the ones I have and more, actually quite sturdy (even if the inside is starting to crack. Oh well. It was inexpensive and can be replaced) and, once decorated, will be quite festive and pretty. I'm not normally a decorator. Maybe I'm changing.

Second order of business: my music folder. This one's actually almost done. Before, it had 1000+ files in it and was extremely sluggish while loading. I sorted it by artist and one Unsorted folder for stuff I haven't actually listened to. Much quicker. There are lots of subfolders, though - and I don't even listen to that many unique artists, comparatively. Maybe soon I should sort by letter, then artist. (All this resorting is going to make iTunes very angry with me once I refill my iPod...) I also defragmented the disk. It needed it. Badly.

Third order of business: the guest room I'm living in. I need to set up my computer desk and finish transferring all my files off the old computer onto mine. While I'm at it, I should probably back up the most important/least replaceable ones to the external hard drive that's been sitting in a box inside my desk drawer for over a year. Unfortunately I can't do anything about the apricot walls. There will be no apricot walls inside my home, when I have a home. Nor will there be this lamp which has been encased in plastic ever since I've been here. On the bright side, the guest room does have a most excellent fan.

Amusing quote by me:

"Get your ****ing bass out of my Krait!"

OK, so Kristin Hersh has this amazing song "Krait", right? And you have to listen to it really loud. You don't have to, but as one of the posters on her message board said, it just gets amazingly larger once you do.

So I have my laptop volume cranked up as high as it can go, and am playing the song. Keep in mind that I am on the second floor of the house. Indoors. The door is closed. All of a sudden, I hear something strange. Something that is decidedly not part of Krait. I know it's the sort of song you discover new things in, but this noise isn't that. So I turn off the song and return to the less interesting real world. It turns out someone is driving by our house with an idiotically loud subwoofer, and their bass has invaded my room. In pure rage, I blurt out the aforementioned quote. This proves two things:

- This house is very cheaply built. I knew that already.

- My subconscious is amazing at producing apropos quotes. Kraits are snakes. And a bass is a fish. It would have been perfect if the krait ate fish, but it doesn't. Oh well. It's a carnivore, that's close enough for something I didn't even plan.

Other current listening: Kym Brown - Pygmalion. Excellent stuff; this was settled after I heard Hollowmen, which does indeed reference T. S. Eliot.

Monday, May 19, 2008: Crashing Relay for Life

My summer project is to be more spontaneous. (If you need proof that it's necessary, note how I called it a project. Project implies deliberate, after all.) So after I got back from the gym at 9 PM and heard music from the baseball field, I went and saw what was going on.

It turns out this was Relay for Life. I know that if something's free, and open to the public, and attended by half the town, you're not really crashing it. But going in with that mentality made it so much more entertaining. (At least until I ran into two people I knew.)

It didn't help being incognito when I set a fire. It was an accident. The place was lined with candles inside paper bags. You should already see the obvious problem here. Anyway, I was taking pictures and leaning against the fence. I noticed my feet felt warm. Then, too warm. I jumped back; sure enough, one of the paper bags was on fire. I stopped and stared at a second until a gaggle of children started to throw sand on it. I was uneasy about this - that's someone's MEMORY you're tossing sand at! - but then I realized that the symbolic implications here were just altogether bad and I should leave it unanalyzed, as much as it pains me to do. Once the fire was out I quickly left the area.

This next vignette, or at least a reference inside it, has the potential to be soul-crushing. It's lose-lose, in a way. Either you've heard of the song in question, in which case your soul already withered a little bit, or you haven't heard of it, in which case you are fantastically lucky and envied by me. In order for this to make any sense, I have to name the song. So please, please, anyone who's reading this, treat this not as a wreck that you have to see for yourself, but more like a flowchart. I'll even set it up that way for you.

Performing at the event was one of those event bands. You know the type. They play at weddings. They play at events sponsored by country clubs. They only play covers, carefully chosen to appeal to the middle-aged, not to corrupt their children, and to have permeated adolescents' and young adults' psyches sufficiently during childhood to be inoffensive. Think adult contemporary.

Well, it seems society, at least Southern society, has "progressed" to the point where that second tenet is withering. I worked in an office. I've listened to enough adult contemporary to know that there are a select few Top 40 songs that are inoffensive enough to fit in with Celine Dion and Billy Joel. But anyway. A few years ago, a certain country artist came out with a song called, and I cringe as I type, "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk." Flowchart starts now. Have you heard it?

Yes - I'm sorry. It will shortly get worse.
No - Describing it would require me to call it up in my mind, which is something I'd prefer not to do tonight. Here's a rough barometer: It's a country song. Figure out what you're imagining it to sound like. Multiply that by 5. Yeah.

As you can probably tell by now, the song's sole purpose is to glorify a particular woman's buttocks. I could argue about objectification, but that's not the problem. The problem: this particular band had the bright idea to cast this as a family number. By that, I meant they called a bunch of children on stage for a 'dance-off,' to these lyrics. By children, I mean children as young as kindergarten, or early elementary school.

There are certain things which are just Wrong. That's just wrong. I don't know which is more depressing: that someone came up with the idea in the first place, that the children involved were A-OK with it, or that the parents of the children involved were OK with it. Times like this are when I wish I had the clout to commission an enormous helicopter with megaphones, to blare out music over the field.

Anyway. That particular fiasco over, things continued as normal. By this point it was about 9:30 and I decided to wander out into the park proper. I've always thought that in a way, the most interesting parts of events, especially outdoor events, are the ones not frequented. This sentiment is superficially ingrained into American consciousness through Robert Frost and others, but not many people actually believe it, at least not in an actionable way. So if you leave behind the crowds and the booths selling trinkets and the funnel-cake stands, you are left with a beautiful night, in a serviceable park. It's almost pastoral. It's also impossible to describe. Such things defy description. Perhaps if I thought about it I could describe it; certainly, if I enjoy writing, that should be fun. I might try it. But not now.

May 10, 2008: A short entry

I've been neglecting my blog. No, wait: I've been cheating on my blog. With Twitter. It's just easier to make snarky little Twitter comments than to write a full, reflective, blog entry. I know this makes me a churned-out product of Internet culture, as well as American culture who has to have everything INSTANT. I like it, though, and it means I'm sharing.

~*~*~

And while I'm detailing new obsessions, the Snowclone Database is about as far up my alley as one can get without hitting the next street. (I tried so hard to coin an original phrase for that. It's difficult. If it wasn't difficult we wouldn't need a Snowclone Database.)

None of that made any sense if you don't know what a "snowclone" is. It's not a tasty fairground treat. It's a derivation of any phrase, such as, say, "a few X short of a Y." This sort of thing fascinates me.

~*~*~

I've also been rearranging this a bit. Notable: a section for my other presences online. Some of them, at least. Also notable: tags.

May 7, 2008: Nostalgia time: Hugo's House of Horrors and Commander Keen 4

Nostalgia is big. The 90s are becoming as much of a commodity as The 80s. I'm complicit in this. I don't know if nostalgia is an innate phenomenon, or a marketed urge, but I partake in it willingly. It surfaces all the time. This evening I suddenly thought that all I wanted to do was go roller skating. (Hey! Now that I'm not a kid anymore, I *can*! Any time I want! I should also go ice skating this winter. I miss that too.)

My 90s were different than some others' 90s, though. I've co-opted some stuff I wasn't around for, like alternative rock, but I have a whole slew of other interests that don't require co-opting. One of the largest: PC games. I don't identify as a gamer, although that might change once I re-acquire some consoles. I did play quite a few older games, though. These are treasure troves of nostalgia, and now I shall wallow.

Remember when games came on floppy disks? (I barely remember when games came on *literal* floppy disks, but I'm not going back that far.) I had one particular set with various games, but there were two that stood out.

~*~*~

First up is Hugo's House of Horrors, a parser-based adventure game. I credit my ongoing interest in interactive fiction to this game. Plot: You're some guy named Hugo. Your girlfriend Penelope took a babysitting job at a supposedly haunted house. Bad Stuff apparently happened; your job is to investigate, because you are a commendably devoted partner. Spoilers now follow.

I also never beat this game. I played it when I was a child and did not know what walkthroughs, FAQs, spoilers, or such were. There's a certain purity in that method which I wish I could get back. I actually solved puzzles on my own, without consulting myriad hints. Hell, I was proud when I smashed the pumpkin to find the key to the actual House of Horrors. I think I also figured out the whole Igor bit, and got into the dinner party or whatnot. I got into the bathroom. I met the dog. But I never figured out how to pacify the dog. In retrospect that wasn't even a difficult puzzle, and I should have gotten it. Oh well. I was just a kid.

The dog scared the crap out of me. The dinner party REALLY scared the crap out of me, especially the "chop" bit (hint: I interpreted it as a verb, not a noun!) Ah, the feeling of youth.

~*~*~

And then there's Commander Keen. Commander Keen 4, that is. "Secret of the Oracle." In movies and often TV, by the time a franchise reaches number 4, it has gone downhill. Games are different. I've played some of the others (by 'some', I mean the ones freely available, which are 1 and the interim, Keen Dreams.) Maybe it's just that the nostalgia factor is missing, but 4 outshines them all.

(to be edited)

I'd be remiss not to mention the music. My interest in video game music is about as extensive as my interest in games, which is to say, not very except in small, potent bursts. This is one of said bursts.

Now then. The music for Keen was composed by Bobby Prince. According to his website, he got the job by responding to a post on the Prodigy music boards, a triumph of coincidence that's as good a story as Mandalay forming from an ad in Melody Maker.

You can listen to it on the YouTube, but from there, you're on your own. (It may or may not be available somewhere if you look hard enough.) Long story short: this is damn good stuff. It's memorable. It's catchy. If I still had a radio show there's absolutely no reason why I wouldn't put it into rotation. (I'm considering talking to some folks, so maybe I will. Have a radio show, that is.) And then there's a track called "Eat Your Vegetables." Why the title? There's a rather amusing backstory.