Don’t Kick Food!

It’s Christmas night. I’m alone at the ancestral homestead, the rest of the family off at an aunt’s or a cousin’s or whatever, playing board games or having conversation or complaining.

Scotch (Glenrothes on the rocks). Taking a break from my grueling holiday schedule of 2D adventure games to write a little bit (between wind-induced power outages).

Poking about on the web, trying to find some ideas for how a particular department in the health sciences could benefit from an employee with librarian training (I’ve been in my current position for about four months and I’m wrapping up a lot of the initial projects I was hired to complete; time to decide what’s next), I came across this: presentation about managing “scholarly identity” online.

Blogs, Twitter, social networking – these dominate the discourse when discussing libraries, universities, and Web 2.0. In this presentation, Michael Habib suggests a different approach: using RSS alerts from <a href="http://www.scopus.com" target="_blankSCOPUS to provide a dynamically updated list of who’s cited a particular researcher’s work.

Habib is employed by SCOPUS, so it’s an obvious example for him, but it’s easy to see how RSS feeds of search results from sites such as PubMed could be used in a similar way. You could post the feeds on a website to keep an up-to-date list of a researcher’s publications and who is citing them without the need for manual data entry. Academic libraries could create feeds that give a picture of the breadth of what is being published at their institution, or assist researchers in discovering what the people one or two buildings away are working on, or keep tabs on just how influential the work of that person they’re competing with for tenure is.

I’m going to propose something along these lines for my department’s website after vacation.

I recently added Shorpy Historic Photo Archive and Vintagraph to my RSS reader. These sites mine the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog of the United States Library of Congress for scans of public domain images, process them in Photoshop, and then sell prints of the restored images.

This is a great idea.

Being somewhat handy with Adobe Lightroom (not so much the Photoshop), I dug around looking for Pittsburgh related images:

(”The Queen of Chinatown” is not a Pittsburgh image, but is a promotional poster for a Broadway play – much better restoration of the image here)

Sent them off to MPix.com for printing and mounting. I got them today. They look great. Next step: frames.

Note: That is the ticket booth from the Garden Theater on the North Side. It showed first and second run films until 1972, when it became a porn theater. The image was dated 1971 – there are posters for From Russian With Love and Dr. No in the background. I used it as a test for MPix’s magnets. They sent me two of them, so I have an extra.

Do you want it?

A few of my posts have been featured on Bitmob.com, a website for people who write about video games (and the culture around them):

• Game Pairings: Red Faction: Guerilla + The Hurt Locker = ?: an extension of this post from soon after I saw The Hurt Locker.
• E3 2009 in Words and Photos: a companion to this, focusing on the reason why I traveled to LA and back in 36 hours.
• Still Life with Rock Band: Box Art Photography: I went all commercial photography one evening. It was a good time.

I’m on vacation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I’m standing in front of a full length mirror in the condo my parents rented for the week. It’s late October – over the course of the week, it will feel like I’m the only tourist in town who doesn’t qualify for AARP membership. I’m surprised by the amount of blonde hair in my mustache and beard. In my apartment at home, the lights aren’t this bright. And I can only see myself from the shoulders up, so having visual confirmation of what the waist of my jeans have been telling me for months is kind of jarring. I don’t remember being this pasty and hairy and lumpy.

I put on a shirt.

The extra weight around my midsection is not just an increased risk of several health conditions; I see it as evidence that my mind has settled a bit over the past year. No more periods of suppressed appetite (the unappealing nature of sea food, so prevalent on this trip, notwithstanding).

We’re staying in a timeshare. Most of my childhood beach trips (first to the Jersey shore, then later the Outer Banks) were spent in condos like this. When I was younger, my brothers and I would search through coffee tables, drawers, closets – looking for things the owners had left for us. We were motivated by the memory of an early trip where this exploration yielded a stack of board games.

Nothing great to be found here – a People magazine special on iCarly, some Nicholas Sparks books. The condo is decorated after the TGI Friday fashion, with the faux-antiques and signs all beach-themed. There are lots of puns involving the word “crabby”.

The building is relatively recent – it’s seven or eight floors tall, beachfront. Nestled between two RV park/campgrounds. It looks more than a little out of place – which is saying something, considering much of the architecture of this area is built around giant concrete pirate ships and volcanoes and pyramids and sharks.

It’s what some might consider trashy: it’s amazing and tacky and desperate and full of hope and wonder. Everywhere you look, reach exceeds grasp (a phrase more forgivably turned by a fair prettier voice in a far prettier body and verse rather than prose, perhaps – but still accurate). In the off-season, everything looks bleak – there aren’t people around. The paint is faded and flaking. The minigolf courses are empty.

Cruising down 17 with my parents – they’re hunting for bargain hoodies, I’m looking for sandals. We stop at a store having a clearance sale, and I have hope. I find sandals with the logos of licensed “import” beers like Guinness and Corona – drinks of the partying and slightly moneyed youth. I lose hope.

I gawk briefly at a beach towel with an image of Bob Marley and a lion’s head back to back like Janus (Jah-nus?) and the assortment of weapons in a display case: knives and brass knuckles of varying design and licensors (Batman is a registered trademark of DC Comics) and tasers and halberds.

There are aisles of rows of mass produced tchotkes with Myrtle Beach painted on in felt tip pen . Arbitrary souvenirs that have no meaning except when they are in a context hundreds of miles away and are ascribed a symbolic importance as detached from the day to day experience of the vacation as the vacation is from the day to day. Most people are not so pompous as to commemorate their trip with a thousand words.

For the majority of the vacation, I keep to myself. I interact primarily with wait staff. They notice my accent, ask where I am from. Depending on the size of the restaurant and its proximity to a major highway, you’re likely to find many transplants. As you get further from the main drag, the accents of staff and customer get thicker, blend together and become more consistent. The restaurant owners start looking more and more like Paula Deen, and you start to realize just how much of an archetype she is. Your waitress brings you hush puppies and honey butter and sweet tea and smiles at you from behind her exaggerated Kate Gosselin spiky hair and lopsided bangs-do, destroying your Yankee snobbery with Southern charm and deep fried cornbread.

And you eat. And it is good.

After a few days of ups and downs, I’ve managed to hack together a couple instances of SimplePie to get true spies feed aggregation working again.

To those of you who subscribe to the feed, I apologize for the multiple times over the past few days when you’ve been bombarded with 20-30 “new” posts all at once. That’s over now, and your reader should be pointed here to subscribe.

If most of your readers come from an RSS feed which lets them know when you’ve updated (rather than them having to check frequently to see if you’ve posted anything), does that mean you can blog less often and not have to worry that you’re wasting people’s time on a visit with no new content? And does THAT mean that you can avoid burnout by overblogging when you have nothing to say?

I recently took a walk along the Duck Hollow Trail, part of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail that runs along the northern bank of the Mon across from Homestead.

There’s a pattern to the trail: any time a fence was posted on either side of the trail, there is guaranteed to be something interesting on the other side.

I came across what looked like a hastily abandoned campsite along the trail – bottle of water, socks, hair brush, sleeping bag, feathers in a pile. Wasn’t really sure what to make of it. I haven’t been alone in a natural setting like that in a long time; I realized how unused to it I was when I jumped at every noise made by a squirrel or bird just off to the side of the trail. I’m sure the anxiety from my day-to-day life had nothing to do with me being so edgy.

After about twenty minutes or so, I adjusted to the sounds. My mind calmed down, and it was very relaxing. Then I dropped a lens cap in the river.

I was heading down a path to a rock on the bank where I wanted to sit for a while. The noise of the traffic had given way to the people cheering and shouting and enjoying the weather at Sandcastle, which was almost directly across the river from me. This rock was one of the few interesting things not fenced off (though it was less the fences and more the worry of hurting myself without anyone around to help me that kept me inside them). I was halfway down the hill when my lens cap fell out of my camera bag (that I had left unzipped for easy access to different lenses). I watched it bounce down the slope, split into its two parts, each entering the water with a self-satisfied plop.

After zipping the bag shut to ensure the lenses wouldn’t suffer the same fate, I made it to the rock. Through some contortions which made what I’m sure was an amusing sight to anyone at Sandcastle who happened to be looking across the river at the time (through binoculars, the weirdos…), I managed to fish out both pieces of the lens cap. I sat on the rock while I waited for them to dry in the sun.

Lots of graffiti (some of it meta: see left) to be found on the rust-and-concrete skeletons of steel industry buildings. As someone who gets a kick out of ruins (I was going to be an archaeologist when I came to college, until I realized it was more about middens and potsherds; I don’t have the patience or the eye for detail required to analyze multicolored patches of dirt or to dig in grids), keeping out of these structures was difficult. I did climb through one that sat on the opposite side of the trail from the river. Lots of cogs. And spider-webs. And 2009 graffiti.

Exploring the remains of an old conveyor belt that stretched out over the water and appeared to extend back into a tunnel under the trail was especially tempting. Maybe some other time, yeah? If anyone’s interested? Of course, the most direct access to this area would involve climbing down twenty or so feet of rusted framework, so maybe not the best idea…

The trail ends at the train tracks beneath the Glenfield Bridge (technically, it ends before that, but all the fences were cut down and an unofficial path continues to the tracks, where I assume people cross them to get to Second Avenue in Hazelwood). I walked the rails for about a quarter of the way back to the parking lot (I had seen a bunch of empty train cars sitting alongside the trail and was curious about them). This is probably illegal and dangerous.

I did not climb any of the train cars. Not even the very-rotted flatbed. It was difficult to say how long they’d been sitting there. They were relatively graffiti-free, which suggested they hadn’t been there long at all. Standing beside them and being as sentimental as I am, it wasn’t difficult to imagine they’d been there for years, and would be there until they rusted away to nothing. Signs suggested otherwise: they were there until they could be repaired and then returned to service (a slip dated April 2008, on the side of one of the middle cars, put to rest any of my romantic permance-is-naught-but-rust notions).

After I’d run out of train cars to look at, I fought back through the trees and undergrowth and fairly slid down the slope to the trail. By this point I was getting hungry and irritable, the temperature was getting hotter and the insects hungrier. It was a very focused and brisk walk back to the car.

I have a feeling this trail would be really great in the fall/early winter, after the leaves have fallen and all the steelwork is exposed.

I took more photos along the trail – you can see the slideshow here.

Well over a month ago, Andy and I went to the Heinz History Center in the Strip. I hadn’t been there since it opened, Andy had never been (for shame!).

The original plan was to SEE LINCOLN FOR A LINCOLN. The main exhibit was about the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, and on the weekend of July 4th admission was only $5. Or a penny. Or, possibly, the donation of a car. There was some ambiguity in the advertising.

I didn’t take any notes on the experience, and just got around to uploading the photos last night. I present the slideshow here, unannotated.

Some highlights will show up on my photoblog, “Born Digital”.

It was very dark and I was not using my flash.

Standing on the corner, waiting to cross. “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” blasting in the headphones, bobbing my head along to the music.

A guy steps up beside me, unremarkable looking. Tan sport-shirt, collar points buttoned, tucked into a pair of jean shorts. Small shoulder bag strapped across his chest.

He steps into the street, notices the traffic, jumps back onto the curb. He digs into his pocket and pulls out a yo-yo (translucent blue Duncan Butterfly, from the look of it). He snaps it down, cats-cradles his fingers around a bit and rocks-the-baby. He drops it, lets it spin at the end of the rope for a few seconds.

The “Walk” sign lights up, he jerks his wrist up. The yo-yo complies with his command, returning to his hand. He pockets it and crosses towards the library.

For a few minutes near the end of the film, a member of the company (James) returns to civilian life. This is the space where John Rambo exists. James isn’t built for or wired for or insert-your-own-dehumanizing-agency-removing phrase-here for that existence. The effect on those around him isn’t harped on, but it only takes three or four shots to explicate (as far as the film is concerned).

“War [or combat or adrenaline] is a drug” – the drug that wakes him up is the same drug that another ODs on and that breaks a third. Anti-war or pro-war seems irrelevant – not sure that it’s enough about war to merit either of those distinctions.

Paired with a video game played later that afternoon: Red Faction Guerilla. It’s about a group of Mars colonists who are being occupied by Earth military (Imperialists being imperialed upon – except does it count as imperialism if the land was uninhabited?) Lots of explosive tactics show the other side of The Hurt Locker’s focus on the EOD. Different thoughts while driving a truck rigged to explode and take out a bridge; the similarities of the images of dust swirling on the red sands of Mars/deserts of Baghdad. They’re not real, in the game. Not the same way I am. Easy to dehumanize the enemy when they’re just bytes and sprites.

Too much punctuation.

Brain dump over.