Since I couldn’t get the authentic polygraph instrument I wanted, I settled for this one:
Vintage Mattel, circa 1960.
Archive for August, 2008
What do these things have in common? Not a damned thing, except for the fact that they’ve all been on my mind this morning. I woke up early, congested, and decided to come downstairs and watch a little bit of TV. I flipped through several channels of infomercials and cable porn before settling on “The Bridge” — a documentary about suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The filmmaker showed actual footage of a number of jumps and attempted jumps, which is quite disturbing and somewhat surprising, until you realize that being one of the most popular tourist destinations, there are probably cameras focused on it all day long. Lengthy interviews are also conducted with the loved ones left behind, and with jumpers who lived. I have a lot of trouble understanding how things get so bad that one feels there is no other option, but that’s easy for me to say. I have a good life. Even when things are bad, they’re not that bad.
On a lighter note, when I get out of bid early and my big feet aren’t completely cooperating yet, I notice that I tend to take the stairs in a sideways/sidestep manner.
And yesterday I noticed this on ebay. I wish I could afford it. As a dabbler in collecting cultural artifacts, this is damn near irresistable.
It’s a vintage polygraph machine, circa 1980ish according to the listing. Nowadays they’re computerized. The seller claims it used to belong to a CIA employee and has it listed for a $1,000 buy-it-now price. I can picture using it at home. “Did you brush your teeth? Don’t lie to me, the machine knows everything.” And then later, my kids confessing to their therapists, “My dad used to polygraph us at home.”
The family was away at sailing camp for a few days this week. I took advantage of the opportunity to do something out of pattern and out of character, if anything can be considered out of character for me. I packed up my camping gear and camped out at the lake one night. It’s only fifteen minutes from work, so I was fishing from about 6:30 to 8:30, then I built a fire and had a beer, and went to sleep. Great night, great morning, and I managed to get a walk in as well. I was reminded, however, of how much I dislike sleeping on the hard ground. Guess it’s time for the air mattress.
I did my normal run this morning, still improving my pace but still not race-ready yet. This is really a tangent — I wore my 2005 Race for the Cure tshirt for my run this morning. When I put it on, I thought, this is appropriate for working out in. While I was on the trail, I had to laugh. To others seeing me running in it, it might say, “This guy ran in the 2005 Race for the Cure, he’s kind of out of shape now, maybe he’s just getting back into running.” In reality, I participate in 2005 with people from my then-current place of employment. Since it was in DC, I stayed at Jeff’s apartment the night before instead of coming up in the morning. Jeff and I had quite a bit of scotch that night. Now that I think of it, that must have been the night Saul met us at Joe Theismann’s earlier in the evening. So the mental image others get by seeing a race shirt, one of a confident athletic guy running a race, is quite different than the reality, two guys so hungover from the previous night’s scotch that it was a chore to complete the 10K even at a walking pace. But hey, at least I got a couple of t-shirts out of it.
Yesterday I walked instead of running, due to soreness. Today I made up for it by doing the 4.5 mile circuit in five minutes better time than my last attempt. My hope is that I can stick with this long enough to get a pace worthy of entering an 8K or 10K race at some point, which probably means under 12 minutes per mile. Right now I’m just under 14.5 minutes, so unless I hurt myself, it’s doable.
Wednesday I saw a beaver in the lake, swimming away with a mouthful of “stuff.” The day before, a couple of deer were grazing in the open field area adjacent to the lake. The bugs have been bad during the past few days, I think I got bit by something on my neck the other day, it left a small discolored area. I hope I don’t have some dreaded jungle disease spread by bug bites.
The girls and I went to Patriot Park this morning, and we can happily report that we have found all five letter boxes planted there. It’s a nice park, and every time we’ve been there so far, it’s been empty. Apparently not many people are aware of it yet.
From Bright Lights Film:
“Accidental crowd” could be applied to Delphine Kreuter’s debut feature 57,000 Kilometers Between Us. The whirling narrative centers on a family who mediates its malfunctioning through camcorders, blogs, the Internet, anything but facing each other. Nat (Marie Burgun) lives with her newly remarried mother, Margot (Florence Thomassin), and stepfather, Michel (Pascal Bongard), who is determined to record every moment of everyone in the household. Hidden away in her room, Nat tries to maintain a connection to her transsexual father, now Nicole (Stephanie Michelini) and husband Khaled (Mohamed Rouabhi). She has a budding online romance with fellow teenager Adrien (Hadrien Bouvier), isolated in a cancer ward, and a more troubled link with a man (Mathieu Amalric) happiest in diapers. The description brings to mind the contrived kinkiness of generically edgy movies, but photographer and video artist Kreuter never falls back on the merely quirky. Relying on hand-held cameras and alternating between digital video and film, she makes the viewer feel just as disoriented as the characters do. Often difficult to watch, 57,000 Kilometers Between Us is a bleak dispatch on where unchecked access to technology leads. Although Kreuter has concentrated several pathologies into one family, none of the situations particularly strains credulity: they’re on offer to anyone who cares to trawl the Internet. Perhaps most chilling is Adrien’s well-to-do mother who chooses to turn off her screen for her nightly camcorder dinners with her chemo-bald teenage son. Dressed up at formal place setting, she talks to the blank screen in an image worthy of Bunuel.
Last night, in addition to being First Friday, was the opening reception for Mirinda Reynolds at her new location at Libertytown Arts Studio. I like going to Libertytown, because I always get to see works from an artist I hadn’t seen before, and works I hadn’t seen by artists I like. Aside from viewing new works from Mirinda (photos coming soon), which is always a pleasure, there were two pieces by Brandon Newton that caught my eye — an oil painting of Rt 3 near Denny’s, but it wasn’t the subject matter that grabbed me, it was the visual properties of the painting. It looked a bit like I was looking through a windshield on a drizzly day. I’m no art critic, but it worked for me. And there was another piece by him, a dark painting of a woman, which was hanging on the wall facing the stairs, so that you’d see it on the way downstairs. I liked that one as well. Rob Landeck had some excellent guitar paintings that we found ourselves wanting to buy for the basement/bar/pool-room. And Bill Harris, well, I just wish I could afford paintings.
Afterwards we wandered through the misters at Kybecca to taste some very interesting Austrian wine, bought a couple of bottles and headed home. It was hot out, or we might have done more.
We sold our Tahoe the other day. After I got the new job, I first bought Eve’s brother’s motorcycle, a Honda VTX 1300. That was great, but impractical for a 60-mile commute. Perhaps if I had known about the alternate route I might have kept it. A short while later we sold that and bought a Prius, because it’s about the only thing that gets better gas mileage than a motorcycle.
Shortly after that, her brother was ready to let go of a 2000 Suburban, loaded and in great shape. We made the decision to pick that up as an upgrade to the Tahoe (1995, 305K miles). After one failed ebay sale, we relisted it and it was snapped up quickly. If you’ve ever wondered “What kind of an idiot buys a vehicle with over 300,000 miles on it?” I can now answer that for you. It was picked up buy a company that exports vehicles. Our Tahoe is on its way to South America.
