The cable guy came today. He set us up with a nice new box, a remote with its own dedicated on-demand button, a spanking-new modem that seems to work with blistering speed BUT CANNOT COMMUNICATE WITH MY WIRELESS ROUTER. JUST LIKE THE LAST ONE. WHICH MEANS I MUST STORM THE APPLE STORE TOMORROW AND INSPIRE FEAR AND TREMBLING IN THOSE WHO WOULD TELL ME THIS ROUTER IS FINE, JUST FINE, LIKE THE LAST ONE DID.
Excuse me.
What this means is, in addition to my house being full of haphazardly packed cardboard boxes, I also have internet service that only works when I’m hard-wired into the modem, which is in the basement. My basement is fine, but I don’t like hanging out down here. So this will be brief. Sorta.
The move went OK. Of course it was the coldest day of the year, in the sense that the mercury never topped 20 degrees and we had the front door standing open half the day. The movers were pleasant and uncomplaining, so I bought them lunch. They were pretty easy to please, preference-wise, but one guy was adamant that he would eat no beef or pork. He had a lilting West Indian accent, so I asked where he was from.
“Jamaica,” he said.
“They grow a nice marijuana down there, I hear,” I replied.
“Everybody wants to stereotype us like that!” he exclaimed. “We are not all ganja smokers!”
“I didn’t say you were,” I said. “Just commenting on a well-known cash crop of your native land.”
The other mover jumped in with a story about another time he’d moved a family to Grosse Pointe, and discovered a tall marijuana plant growing in the back yard. And the third mover told us about moving one of the Mrs. Fords, and how she made them rearrange her furniture — including a piano — half a dozen times and was a real rhymes-with-witch.
Everybody has a good story to tell. If you buy them a sandwich, frequently they’ll tell it.
So now we’re settled, sort of, and I’m starting to see the place the way I want it to look. Window treatments are first, then paint. The house has good bones, but it needs some pizazz. I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon, two yuppies talking to one another: “Like lots of people in the ’80s, we over-shuttered.” Like lots of people in the suburbs, our previous owners over-neutraled. Our bedroom is mocha-on-cafe au lait, our family room white, our living room sage. Even the one vivid room in the house, the dining room, is sort of a …neutral shade of burgundy. So we have lots to do.
Thank God I’m married to a man who looks at the sage living room and says, “That color needs more silver, and less olive.” And he’s heterosexual!
I’ll post some pictures directly. In the meantime, here’s a bit o’ bloggage:
David Edelstein writes the story I’ve been waiting to read about Ralph Covert, for whom parents of young children would happily make burnt offerings. He makes children’s music, but is to Raffi what Jimi Hendrix was to Pat Boone. In other words, you — the parent — actually want to listen to it.
Frank Kovas died Saturday. More on that later this week. He was the man who brought talk radio to Fort Wayne and…a complicated man. Gotta think on that one for a while.
A small confession: In the last weeks before I moved, I discovered the reruns of “CSI” on Spike TV. To my everlasting shame, I actually watched a few of these, even though I hate the show, but not as much as Alan, who won’t allow it to be left on for longer than 3 seconds. I hate it so much I had to watch them, sometimes two in a row. Here’s what I hate about the show, in no particular order:
1) It’s lurid, in a creepy way. I don’t want to go up the bullet hole behind the bullet, OK?
2) I particularly hate its icky take on sex, which, to watch “CSI,” you’d think no one ever has in a pleasing, affectionate non-fatal manner.
3) But I most of all hate the preposterousness of it. Anyone who’s covered the public sector as a reporter, or anyone who’s even paid five minutes of attention to their own particular public sector, finds the suspension of disbelief required to watch this show almost unendurable. On “CSI,” simple muggings are given the sort of manpower only presidential assassinations would garner, and except for Marg Helgenberger’s occasional throwaway line about the budget, virtually no attempt is made to square this with reality. And it takes place in Nevada! A conservative western state, where no expense is spared the taxpayers! As if.
In real life, DNA results take weeks to get. On “CSI,” they come back before lunch. In real life, no one has a $10,000 gadget that can sniff the air in a bathroom and tell which perfume was worn by a person who passed through earlier in the day. OK?
All of which would be harmless, but I understand judges are now identifying a “CSI effect” on juries, some of whom are reluctant to convict criminals because the police didn’t do the Super-Deluxe DNA Test AND call in the blood-spatter expert from Amsterdam AND have other chemical analyses of evidence.
Anyway…how did I get on this tangent? Oh, yeah: Jon Carroll brings us down to earth.
Can you tell I have a Caribou Coffee on the corner, and I stopped there recently?
More later.
Joe Kobiela said on February 1, 2005 at 6:28 pm
N,
Congradulation on the move, hope all works out well, I understand why you do not like csi, being a pilot I feel the same way when they butcher a movie or show about flying. People complain about the high cost of flying out of Fort Wayne can blame Frank Kovis, his little fit over the runways,which got built anyway, caused the landing fee’s to the airlines to be so high they had to charge way more for airfair. Fort Wayne at one time had the second highest fees in the nation, only Denver’s were higher. Who knows how much business and jobs were lost over this. The only reason he went off on the airboard was over the fact he lost out on a contract to fuel Burlingtons jets to Kelly’s. [end rant]. Again congradulation on the move and good luck.
Joe
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Bartleby said on February 1, 2005 at 8:04 pm
Ah, yes, CSI … not only is the phony-baloney “science” a howl, but the plots … they’ve got to have the stupidest perps ever heard of. All the investigators have to do is claim to know anything, and the perp can’t wait to say, “Yeah, I did it.” Haven’t any of them ever heard of a lawyer?
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Dorothy said on February 1, 2005 at 8:52 pm
Okay I can’t resist temptation.
Congratulations on the move.
That’s all I have to say…. well, that, and WELCOME BACK!
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MichaelG said on February 2, 2005 at 9:40 am
I’m pleased the move went well. Once you’re in, the set up and arranging and stuff can be kinda fun. I know you’ll love it there.
Hah, and they laughed at me for watching “Survivor”.
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Danny said on February 2, 2005 at 10:05 am
Welcome back, Nance. You were missed!
Though I don’t watch much TV, my wife recently got a package deal by switching our phone service to cable and we upgraded to expanded service with the box and remote. So last night, she discovered the on-demand stuff and was watching on-demand HGTV or some such thing when I got home. So I sits down after a 12 hour day and decides to play with the o-d feature meself. Adult Swim to Space Ghost to, whoa! marital disharmony?!? Wow, she really got irritated with that show and in only about a minute. Knowing which side me breads buttered on, I turned it back to HGTV.
Don’t know why I shared that. I guess it was just kinda amusing and something I put in the category of girls-are-wired-differently-than-boys.
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helper said on February 2, 2005 at 12:15 pm
Apple wireless routers have had trouble in the past with certain cable modems. Try buying a cheap hub and putting that between your router and the cable modem. That should fix it.
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Mindy said on February 2, 2005 at 1:45 pm
So glad you’re back. And such an easy move, too.
Ain’t it great to have good coffee so close? I have a similar situation and am ruined forever. So watch out, it’s easy to get addicted and stop in for a cup too often. Last week I bartered the shop’s owner a bucket of coffee for a scarf made on my knitting machine. She ended up happily giving me two buckets of coffee, not bad for twenty minutes’ work. I’m hoping she wants more scarves.
Your new place sounds very livable just the way it is. Give yourself time to catch your breath before brandishing that paint brush.
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juan said on February 2, 2005 at 2:02 pm
The thing that comes to mind when I watch “CSI: Poughkeepsie” or “24” is:
“How many additional cops/terrorist chasers could you afford if you didn’t have uber-modern facilities, and interior design ala the “Monster House” crew on crystal meth?”
I mean, is neon-trimmed, purple wainscotting REALLY essential to the interrogation process? Perhaps the suspects confess so rapidly because they fear the Queer Eye guys are going to walk in and start mocking their clothes.
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Dwight Brown said on February 2, 2005 at 8:53 pm
Some of the CSI comments seem, to me, to deserve responses. I admit: I watch, and enjoy, CSI:Original Recipie, but I think it has developed some problems in the last two seasons. (I’ve watched one episode of CSI:NY, and don’t have any desire to watch others; I gave up on CSI:Horatio Caine and The Sunglasses of Justice after two seasons. And I still miss Homicide, at least the first couple of seasons.)
“1) It’s lurid, in a creepy way. I don’t want to go up the bullet hole behind the bullet, OK?” De gustibus non disputum est.
“2) I particularly hate its icky take on sex, which, to watch “CSI,” you’d think no one ever has in a pleasing, affectionate non-fatal manner.”
This might be a fair cop: I’d point out that these are people who see other human beings at their worst, and what is one of the more frequent motives for violence? They wouldn’t get called out for non-icky sex, would they?
“On “CSI,” simple muggings are given the sort of manpower only presidential assassinations would garner, and except for Marg Helgenberger’s occasional throwaway line about the budget, virtually no attempt is made to square this with reality.”
I’m having a hard time recalling an episode where a “simple mugging” was given that level of manpower: can you cite a specific example?
“In real life, DNA results take weeks to get. On “CSI,” they come back before lunch.”
A point that I’ve heard the producers acknowledge, and defend as a necessary story-telling shortcut.
William Goldman, in his book *Which Lie Did I Tell?* talks a little about the dramatic convention shortcut. (I think he has a better name for it than that, though.) No one expects to find a parking place exactly in front of their building: but we accept that the hero of the action movie manages to find one in front of his destination in time to foil the terrorist plot. No one expects the random bill they pull out of their wallet to be sufficient for cab fare: but we accept that the random bill the hero pulls out will cover it. Why? Because no one wants to see 5-10 minutes of the hero looking for a parking space, or searching his wallet for that $50 he was sure he got out of the bank this morning. (Though you might be able to make a funny movie that subverted some of these convetions.)
Same with DNA: a dramatic shortcut in the interest of narrative expediency.
“In real life, no one has a $10,000 gadget that can sniff the air in a bathroom and tell which perfume was worn by a person who passed through earlier in the day.”
My recollection of that episode is that neither did the CSI’s: they used something Gil improvised out of glassware and tubing in his kit to collect the air sample. (There’s your “nod to the budget” in that episode.) I can’t speak to the accuracy of the software they used to analyze the sample, since I’m not a trained foresnic tech.
“…I understand judges are now identifying a “CSI effect” on juries, some of whom are reluctant to convict criminals because the police didn’t do the Super-Deluxe DNA Test AND call in the blood-spatter expert from Amsterdam AND have other chemical analyses of evidence. ” I have two answers to that, which I’ll describe as “weak” and “strong” (based on how good I feel about these arguments).
The “weak” answer: Is that such a bad thing? Given the stories in the media about people being released from prison after twenty years behind bars because DNA testing proved them innocent, is it a bad thing that juries are looking at the prosecution with a bit more skepticism, and expecting all the ducks to be lined up? Sure, I realize not every crime has DNA, but it is a bad thing that the prosecution has to say, for example, “No DNA was recovered: there was evidence that the rapist wore a condom.”?
The “strong” answer: is CSI any more responsible for people who can’t tell fiction from real life than any other television show? What next: blaming MTV for teenage sex? (Oh, wait, never mind…)
“How many additional cops/terrorist chasers could you afford if you didn’t have uber-modern facilities, and interior design ala the “Monster House” crew on crystal meth?”
Gee, the CSI facilities don’t exactly strike me as “uber-modern”, or any design other than “basic functional”. (I don’t watch “24”.) And as far as how many additional cops could you afford: how many people do you end up letting go when the roof leaked and your evidence got rained on, because you were spending money on more cops rather than the lab? (This really happened, in the Houston Police Department crime lab.)
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mary said on February 2, 2005 at 8:57 pm
I’m amazed that CSI is so popular, but it’s even more amazing that the bullshit on that show is now influencing juries. Oh well.
Congrats on the smooth move. Picking out colors and painting is actually pretty interesting. It’s very gratifying very quickly, as well. I installed drainage pipes under my garage a few years ago, and while I know it’s a great improvement, it wasn’t nearly as rewarding as painting my living room.
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brian stouder said on February 2, 2005 at 9:06 pm
Kovas certainly seems to have personified talk radio. His little station – WGL, was the first in FW many years ago – to go “all talk, all the time”, and he was the guy who brought Rush Limbaugh’s show into town.
Clearly, he knew how to make a buck, and – maybe it’s just the nature of the medium – the smallness of his nature always came shining through.
I remember hearing toe-curling blasts of anti-semitic rants, and all sorts of other bile on his “intercom” show – not always from him, but always agreed to by him.
If one looks at, say, Ian Rolland on the one hand, and Kovas on the other – you see the Alpha and the Omega of successful Fort Wayne business leaders.
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Nance said on February 3, 2005 at 10:32 am
“The Sunglasses of Justice”? That’s tremendous.
My recollection of an early CSI episode — albeit this was the B-story thread — was about men who were waking up in hotel rooms with empty wallets, with their last memory being inviting a prostitute up to the room.
One would think this is such a routine occurrence in Las Vegas as to barely get a police response, but noooo. It was a case for at least two CSIs. It turned out the men were all given the same knockout drops, but they’d not consumed drinks or food with the hooker. What, what could it be? It wasn’t until a hooker lost consciousness behind the wheel of her car and bumped a lightpost that the truth was revealed:
She was putting the mickey on her nipples! And when the men sucked them, they were drugging themselves. And because aereolae are a semipermeable membrane, eventually one of the girls effectively dosed herself.
I found this just … icky.
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Dwight Brown said on February 3, 2005 at 11:16 am
“”The Sunglasses of Justice”? That’s tremendous.”
Thank you, but I have to confess that I ripped that off, er, borrowed that from Television Without Pity.
==Dwight
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mary said on February 4, 2005 at 2:26 pm
Thank you for the synopsis of the icky CSI episode. It has that tangy combination of stupidity and ickiness, that makes it hard to forget. Nipple mickeys? Feh.
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