Category: What the…?

I am a human rocket
On a mission of deployment
I’ve been cocked and loaded
Ready for the culmination
I am a human missile
Guided by a secret agenda that commands my every thought and deed
And wills me on my way

I am a human rocket
On a mission of redemption
I’ve been cocked and loaded, primed by everything I know
I am a human missile
Guided by a secret voice that commands my every action
And wills me on my way

There is no turning back, there are no second thoughts
First things first and all things fair, be it love or war, they say
There is no plan named B on the land in the air or on the sea
That is what’s supposed to be
My duty now awaits me

I am a human rocket
On a mission of instruction
I’ve been primed and programmed since the beginning of time
I am a human missile
Guided by a secret master
That commands my every motion
And wills me on my way

I’ve found my target,
I’ve reached my co-ordinates
I’m set to detonate and resonate
The final poem I will create
I’ve made a video
It tells a story, oh….
I guess it’s time to go
Don’t forget to rewind!

I am a human rocket
On a mission of destruction
I’ve been locked and loaded
And ready for the confirmation
I am a human missile
Guided by a secret perfection that commands my full conviction
And wills me on my way

Large parts of the experience will go by unnoticed
We are all distracted by the lights and sounds of everything and nothing
Did you remember the breath you took when I let you off the hook?
And sent you swimming away back into your cell?

I am a human rocket
On a mission of reduction
I’ve been cocked and loaded
Since the dawn of time
I am a human missile
Guided by a secret voice that commands my every thought and deed
And wills me on my righteous way

—Devo, “Human Rocket”, Something for Everybody

Food 4 Less still has the durian fruit in their produce section. While Barbara and I were shopping there today I noticed another less exotic though still amusing import.

When we were in Mexico a couple of years back, I saw the Bimbo bakeries logo everywhere on signs, trucks, and shops. We got a bit of a chuckle remembering Barbara’s research a couple decades back to demolish an opposing attorney’s argument claiming that “bimbo” wasn’t really a derogatory term. I guess it’s a good thing he hadn’t spent much time in Spain or Mexico or he’d have claimed it just meant “bread”.

We wondered at the time how the brand would fare in the US, little knowing that Bimbo was already the corporate owner of well-known US brands like Orowheat, Entenmann’s, and Boboli. And now you can get your Bimbo bread here in Portland.

Last week was the first time I’d ever hosted the bi-weekly poker game that I’ve been playing in for a couple of years, so I had to set everything up to make sure that at least one table could be shoehorned into the space I was planning to use. As you can see, our living room doesn’t have the typical poker mancave ambience of someone’s basement/garage/unused bedroom.

The “Catsino” is not only bright and airy, but it’s got a couch, a loveseat, and a cushy chair like “The Grand” room at the Golden Nugget Casino where Poker After Dark is filmed (although there’s a bit less clearance between the back of the player’s chairs and the cushions). The stuff on top of the TV includes the Ganesh statue I bought for our nineteenth anniversary.

You can probably guess from the fact that I took a picture I was pretty pleased with the setup. I arranged 20 buy-ins and add-ons worth of chips and a bunch of extras on the table, put an ace of diamonds and four of clubs on the table to honor Tomer Berda’s World Series of Poker bracelet win (using one of the “official” WSOP decks I bought in Vegas when I flew down to have lunch with him, and which are not standard-size poker cards), and fortuitously found a clip from Poker After Dark to put on the TV showing Phil Ivey about to lose a bunch of money with a set of fours to David “Viffer” Peat who’s drawn a flush with my favorite hand: a suited ace and jack.

I have to say, I was quite pleased with how this shot came about, as well as how it looks. I was flying south out of Portland on Friday morning and about twenty minutes into the flight I had a great view of a snow-capped mountain outside my window. Like the TSA-obedient traveler that I am, however, I had “turned off, not just placed in airplane mode” all of my electronic devices, and that view was rapidly sliding away as I waited for my iPhone to start up. I got off a couple of quick shots of the mountain almost broadside, then sort of leaned forward to shoot back and get one last shot as we passed. I managed to get South Sister (in the foreground), with the peaks of the shorter Middle and North Sisters just poking through the clouds breaking over the Cascades, Mt. Jefferson in mid-range, and Mt. Hood just visible on the horizon.

As always, a few words from my cousin Roxana about our grandmother, who was murdered nine years ago today:

I have spent many years in a volunteer capacity working against domestic violence, so I was shocked when my grandmother was shot and killed June 11 in the White Salmon area. My grandmother was bedridden, blind, and has suffered many strokes over the years. I did not expect her to die in this manner.

She died because her caregiver, Toni Stencil, was the target of an angry man.

There is not room to write all the details Toni has given me, and Toni has her own story to tell. I am not a legal expert, or an expert in domestic violence. I am simply a granddaughter asking questions and looking for answers on why my grandmother had to die so violently.

Through my questions, I have found out that the state of Washington has a Mandatory Arrest Law, as does Wisconsin, where I now live. This law does vary from state to state, and I’m not clear on the stipulations in your law. What I have been told by Toni is that she called 9-1-1 on the Thursday evening prior to the (Monday) shooting because this man had bound her and held her against her will for over three hours. She talked her way out of this dangerous situation and did call 9-1-1.

I wonder why he was not arrested on that evening. Certainly this will be determined, and police in White Salmon have declined to answer my questions concerning this issue at present.

Why should you care about this law? Remember that my grandmother was an innocent victim of a dispute between two people that she had absolutely nothing to do with. This was a dangerous man. Are the laws you have in place working for you? If not, why?

These are the questions running through my head that keep me up at night. There is another state law that interests me as well that I’m checking into concerning self-help information that is to be given to victims of domestic 9-1-1 calls. Three days passed between Toni’s initial call for help and the shooting; she needed professional help. I have found out that you have the Programs For Peaceful Living. This program could have offered Toni some very needed support in a number of ways.

I pose these questions and tell this story because it is my way of helping and healing. On my own, I cannot look into your laws and check into the rapport between your police force and your programs in place to help people. You need to be concerned because you care about the health of your community. I believe domestic violence issues are so important, because the health of a whole community starts in the home.

Please support your local law enforcement and program such as Programs For Peaceful Living in working together against domestic violence.

I always thought that the words “licensed nuclear reactor operator” would be a neat addition to the baccalaureate in English Literature, but not surprisingly, the training program to operate the reactor at Reed College is no cakewalk. So I never even went into the reactor when I was a student, despite having taken an after-school class in third grade taught by a retired Civil Defense chief who taught us to use Geiger counters and calculate the biological effects of our long-term radiation exposure in a nuclear holocaust. But they were giving tours during last weekend’s reunion activities and I got the shot of Cherenkov radiation above with my iPhone, standing practically over the reactor.

Hee Haw! It’s official! I have the worst luck!

According to their analysis of 1,600+ Texas Hold-‘Em hands I played in both tournament and ring games at Full Tilt Poker over a period of three months, Poker Luck Meter says that my luck was at “0% – The bottom 1% of worst possible luck.” The kind of luck where, despite the fact that I got back-to-back four-of-a-kind hands the other night, I still lost the tournament. So I guess it’s fortunate that I haven’t had the kind of bankroll that might lead one to become a professional poker player — I’d only last about ten minutes, according to this.

I have not yet found a tool to analyze the rest of my life.

From the Fujin yesterday:

A small lucky package is on its way to you soon.

Did you say a lucky package? These are always welcome.

Vijay Balse, the leader of the first of two games in the final round of Jeopardy!‘s 2010 Tournament of Champions last night said in his mini-interview with Alex Trebeck last night that it took him six tryouts over a period of sixteen years to finally get picked to compete. So far I’ve only tried out four times including my first attempt about this time of the year in 1996 while I was in Los Angeles visiting my brother and proofing the first (and only) edition of my book on Shockwave, so perhaps there’s still time.

Last week I got an email from Ken Jennings — the winningist person in Jeopardy! history — in response to something I’d sent him. That’s gotta be a good omen, right? I mean, if you’re inclined to believe in omens.

My graduation from college twenty years ago today was a journey fraught with tragedy and comedy, which apparently was my preparation for the past two decades, as a college education should be.

Despite a propensity to slough off my homework, I’d started college early. Mom worked as a quality control chemist and one of her colleagues was teaching in the summer program at Lane Community College. I don’t remember the particulars of how I ended up the first two sections of a basic chemistry course the summer after my freshman year of high school (I can only assume that Mom suggested it because I wouldn’t have known about it otherwise) but I do know that I felt pretty cool spending several hours a day at LCC as a kid among people making up credits or taking requirements for the programs they were entering in the fall. By the beginning of my senior year of high school, I had a full year of college chemistry (with a B average) under my transcript.

But as with so many other things, follow-through wasn’t my strong suit. My senior year in high school was an emotional roller-coaster, and despite inquiries from places like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT, I never followed-up, presuming that a) there was no way I could afford to go there and b) there was no way they were going to offer me a scholarship (see above regarding homework).

I’d wanted to be a sci-fi writer for years, and I’d had a short article professionally published already, but figured I needed some sort of job to actually make money. I was interested in computers. I’d been messing around with them since the summer of my first chemistry class, when I’d stop in downtown Eugene after school and hang out at a new shop called The Real Oregon Computer Company. My aptitude tests pointed me to engineering and sciences (except for an outlier that said I should be a music instructor). So I applied to and was accepted at Oregon State University — where my parents met — in the Electrical & Computer Engineering department. I’d started a part-time job at Gandalf’s Den bookstore in the spring of my senior year of high school; they’d opened up a branch in Corvallis at the Old World Center in downtown, and I was able to earn some money there while I was living in the Beaver Lodge co-op, the least-expensive of the school-approved housing facilities that all freshmen not married or living at home had to stay in. (Is a big house with thirty guys in bunks in a third-floor sleeping porch what came to mind when you read co-op?) Unfortunately, the Corvallis store was probably a bad idea from the start and it was sold to a new owner by Christmas break. I was still moping and upset from the previous year but a girl I knew from high school and I had gotten involved and I wanted to be back in Eugene where she and my few other friends were. I made plans to move back home and switch to the Computer & Information Science department at the University of Oregon for the Spring term. I told my buddy Jon Pitchford that I was moving back to town and he told me he’d just signed up for six years in the Navy. My girlfriend broke up with me on Valentine’s Day.

That early period back in Eugene for me is sort of a blur. I know I went to classes — at least most of them — but I kept falling asleep in even the classes where I usually did well. One name that stuck with me was my discrete math teacher, Sergey Yuzvinsky, who had a most enjoyable accent that I have imitated for thirty years (according to his web page, I must have had him just after he arrived at the university and he’s still at the UofO). Gandalf’s hired me back at the Eugene shop. I met someone — who I’d be with for most of the next four years — in the fall.

The C&IS program of 1980 was a very different world than programming today. At both OSU and the UofO when I first started we were writing lines in FORTRAN or COBOL onto punch cards, turning stacks of cards over to people at windows in the computing center for batch processing, then going off for hours or overnight to bite our nails and hope that we hadn’t made any typos or logical errors. The UofO installed interactive teletype machines in the computing center the first year I was there, which made a world of difference just in the speed at which you could refine and expand a program. Then, a few of us underclassmen discovered the Terak in the basement of Prince Lucien Campbell Hall that was supposed to be for grad students. Instead of a noisy, clattering teletype that shared processing power with everyone else and printed graphics that took minutes to update, just a whirring of disk drives and fans with video.

Problem was, I tested well but I was still a crappy student. I was getting better — or at least I was failing fewer of my courses — but an interest in Japanese culture, a failure to study hard, and a spotty record my first couple of years of real college added up to a perfect storm of academic disqualification when I got an “Incomplete” in the first semester of a Japanese language course I wanted to take. Six credits of failure in one semester and I was out.

By that point in 1982 I was flailing. I didn’t have any money, my folks had been paying for all my school expenses, my bookstore job wasn’t exactly lucrative, I was living with my girlfriend. The economy was going south and my boss was trying to sell the bookstore to us for sweat equity (while keeping the then-profitable game distribution portion of the business for himself). A transcript that had started off as a teen chemistry geek had turned into a formless, useless, 20-year-old. I needed to put some shine on the turd.

Reading aloud had always been fun for me and even as a young man I’d gotten lots of comments on my voice. I don’t know why, because it’s not what you’d think of as a classic phone or radio voice; I sang first tenor in choir, I’d far prefer to have something deep and resonant. So when I looked over the catalog for Lane Community College again, I picked the Mass Communication department. It was fun and interesting. I took a few courses in audio production (I know how to splice tape!), some advertising theory, and a class in electronic music that let me get my hands on an ARP 2600 synthesizer. It wasn’t a four-year degree program, but it was the road to recovery. At least that’s what I thought.

By 1983, the economy had really sunk into the tank. Dad had been hired a couple years earlier as a business agent by the machinists union after serving for most of the ’70s as a local president but so many people lost their jobs that the union laid him off. My brother — who wasn’t just smart but was also popular and a hard worker — had graduated high school as a valedictorian and headed off to college with some savings from summer jobs, scholarships, and financial aid, but he was at Reed College and while it wasn’t charging then what it’s charging now it still wasn’t cheap. I don’t think I ever asked if my folks were helping him out the way they were with me, but I assumed they were. I’d lost my job when my boss finally found someone to buy the Eugene store, which led to a two-year period of unemployment. There just wasn’t a lot of demand for the surplus of moderately-educated young men in Eugene. At that point, I couldn’t see how I could justify staying in school; I was leaching off my folks for living expenses already (not to mention the fallout from the Eucon debacle). I’d come full-circle to LCC. That was the end of it.

Several years passed. The relationship broke up. I worked briefly for a national electronics chain, a Commodore business computer shop that never sold anything, and six months in a convenience store. Then I got back into the book business through the back door at F.C. Himber & Son, who had expanded their grocery store book and magazine distributorship into paperbacks, trade paper and hardcover books for bookstores. My job was low on the totem pole, opening boxes of books, counting and checking them against the packing lists, handling returns, pulling orders when there wasn’t anyone else to do it. Only part-time at first, but it was back working with books. Meanwhile, I started to pick up some after-hours volunteer slots at KRVM-FM, the radio station owned by the 4J school district, and was getting tickets to a variety of music events around town.

In early 1986, my folks passed me the AMC Pacer my father had used for a work car before he was hired back by the Machinists. I started travelling up to Portland for some shows. About the only person I knew there — who wasn’t my grandmother or an aunt or uncle — was Barbara, who I only really knew through the monthly parties at John Varley‘s house. I’d always thought she was pretty entertaining and funny, and when she expressed an interest in accompanying me to punk rock shows at places like Satyricon I was more than happy to have the company.

Looking back on it it’s almost incredible to me how quickly things progressed. Barbara and I hadn’t so much as kissed before June; sometime in the next couple of months I was busily engaged in re-applying to college. And not just any college, but one with a reputation for academic rigor that was at odds with my previous scholastic record. The girl who’d dumped me on Valentine’s Day six years earlier graduated from Reed (although I didn’t know it at the time). My brother had done three years at Reed and moved on to vet school (and wrote me a very nice recommendation letter for my application, making me a legacy of my younger sibling). Reed didn’t have a computer program, but it was an Apple University Consortium school with one of the earliest campus computer networks (in part because of its association with Steve Jobs) and I had seen some of the graphics possibilities of the early Macintosh computers. I’d also decided to go into English, and I figured at least an English degree from Reed ought to command slightly more respect.

At the time, the college had a program called the Eliot Scholarship, which paid two-thirds the cost of two units of classes for a student over the age of 25 with no undergraduate degree. It was a trial — either two classes in one semester or one class in two semesters — after which the college and the student could decide whether or not to continue the relationship under normal circumstances. I didn’t turn 25 until December of that year, but I got my application and transcripts in order for entry in January. For some reason they (specifically, the scholarship administrator, Toinette Menashe) let me in.

Almost nothing from my transcripts transferred. Most of it didn’t have any equivalent at Reed. My PE credits, a couple of math courses, and the year of chemistry I’d taken while I was still in high school and that was about it. I’d been in college full-time for almost three years by 1983, but at the beginning of 1987 I was somewhere in the middle of my freshman year.

I started off with what was ostensibly a math class but which was actually a foray into compiler language theory taught by an instructor in from Oregon Graduate Institute. It was a far cry from the basic programming classes I’d taken seven years before and I doubt I did very well even if I hadn’t been in a class with brilliant kids like Tyler Morrison and Scott Quinn, who were working on Rascal (Real time Pascal), a language developed in Prof. Richard Crandall‘s Software Development Lab (Crandall was also Chief Scientist at Jobs’s NeXT Computer and is an Apple Distinguished Scientist). Within a couple of months I’d started working at Powell’s Books (Himber’s was one of their suppliers at the time, and the company was a lot smaller, so some of the people there were familiar with me). I worked as a “terminal watcher” at Reed, helping people with questions about the computers in the labs. In the fall I took my first semester of the freshman humanities course. I started as a full-time student at the beginning of 1998.

Barbara’s mother died that fall. She quit the law and went to work as a used book buyer at Powell’s, then returned to college herself. I spent the next two summers at Portland State University fulfilling language requirements. My proposal for a creative thesis (essentially the plot for the Robin Williams movie Man of the Year) was shot down, so I wrote my senior thesis on Shakespeare. We searched for and bought a house that year. I defended my thesis and I was through.

My father’s step-father died in early May 1990 and we buried him the week before my graduation, which was held outside on the Reed lawn as tradition demands, in a downpour. Every so often, some portion of the tent over the seats would spill over and dump cold water on the folks listening to Oregon Symphony conductor James DePriest‘s commencement speech.

After the ceremony, everyone was supposed to meet Barbara and me by the flagpole, but apparently this info didn’t get communicated to the peeps. Nor was anyone in much of a rush to congratulate me for finally graduating, because we were waiting by the pole for quite a while while everyone else was scarfing down food in the reception tent. We did finally catch up with people, which is when the photo above was taken. Then we headed home to finish cleaning out our rental house, because graduation day was the last day we had to move out before the new owner took possession.

And that’s the story of The Last Eliot Scholar. At least, the last one to graduate. A few others came after me — one, another Powell’s employee, to whom even I gave a recommendation — but Toinette told me some time later that the program had lost its funding, and that I was the final student to enter through the program and graduate.

It’s been an odd twenty years since. There’s a reunion coming up in two weeks. I’m both interested and apprehensive about going. What’s that say about me?