A Portrait

I found the following in 'The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald':

She will never be able to build a house. She hops herself up on crazy arrogance at intervals and wanders around the woods chopping down everything that looks like a tree. When she comes near to making a clearing it looks like too much to her like all the other clearings she's ever seen so she fills it up with rubbish and debris and is ashamed even to speak of it afterwards. Driven, ordered, organized from without, she is a very useful individual - but her dominant idea and goal is freedom without responsibility which is like gold without metal, spring without winter, youth without age, one of those maddening, coo-coo mirages of wild riches which make her a typical product of our generation. She is by no means lazy yet when she chops down a tree she calls it work - whether it is in the clearing or not. She makes no distinction between work and mere sweat- less in the last few years since she has had arbitrarily to be led or driven.

Holy Jock

Leigh and I attended a family gathering in our honor this past Friday in Williamsburg, VA. As part of the toast her stepfather Ray, who had married us in Hawaii, emerged from the back room to give a toast wearing a novelty grass skirt and coconut 'knockers'. When asked if that was how he had dressed for our ceremony he first responded that he had done it in the buff, and then added, "it was actually more like an 'ecclesiastical thong'."

Nothing Says Xmas....

I was perusing my journal from the last year and I came across a quote from our friend Kenton that must have been a response to our account of spending last Christmas chasing my mother-in-laws cats with a toy gun: "Nothing says Merry Christmas like a Nerf dart to the head."

Maydelle's Bowling Ball

Friday night I attended NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program's Big Screen Event at Frank Gehry's IAC Building to witness Dan Liss' presentation of 'Advent.' When I said hello to his wife Maydelle, who I hadn't seen in some time, I naturally asked her how she was doing. Her response is among my favorite Bowling Balls and a tremendous addition to the compilation of two-word gems. She responded that she was 'relentlessly good.'

('Advent', by the way, was amazing in its block-long digital reproduction of a New York City block, its concept (viewers phoned in to trigger movies in a variety of locations on the block), it's execution and, frankly, the fact that it didn't crash.)

The Folly of Assumptions

I love this photo for a variety of reasons. First of all, it is still one of the most beautiful places I've ever slept. It is located in Yoho National Park in the Canadian Rockies. After graduating from college in 1993, I went on a road-trip through Western Canada with my girlfriend and this is one of the spots we chose to camp. It also is a reminder to me of the folly of assumptions. The day we camped here, she and I planned to do a hike. We had two choices. We could either hike in about eight miles with all of our camping equipment and set up camp along the trail or we could leave our tent and gear positioned in this spot and do a 17 mile hike that looped back to starting point. We elected to do the longer, lighter hike. Here's where I made my first (faulty) assumption. I thought since the 17 mile hike was going up into the mountains, it would represent roughly a 50-50 split of ascent and descent. Wrong. The hike turned out to be approximately 15 miles of uphill walking, with about 2 miles of viciously steep return down a decline of loose scree. The next (faulty) assumption I made was that fire+wood=burning wood. Not so. This equation assumes the presence of oxygen. Yoho, as we discovered, exists at higher elevations. As I recall, she and I took turns blowing all of the oxygen we could find in our own lungs onto the smoldering (and probably wet) wood. We did get the fire going, a lovely meal was shared and then she and I took a post-dinner walk along this river. It was summer and we were quite far north, so the sun stayed with us until after 10pm and I was left in awe of the location and the tranquility of the weather. This would be yet another faulty assumption. A couple hours after we turned in, this tranquil weather would sour completely. Somewhere in the middle of the night, the wind whipped up and it began raining sideways. Due to the beauty of the location and the calm in which we found our spot, we had selected a tent site completely devoid of any protection or cover. The campsite was approximately half a mile from the car, so in the dark and stormy night it provided no haven for retreat. I think we both had to get out of the tent several times to batten down the pegs and the tent may have fully collapsed, I don't recall. I do remember finally making it through the night, the morning being clear and the two of us beating a hasty path to the nearest motel in Banff to make use of a dry room and my parents 'emergency' credit card.

The Teleprompter of Doom

I was in Des Moines, Iowa a few weeks back filming the Des Moines Marathon for Prevention.com. We had hired a 'local' crew - they were based in Omaha - and during a break in the action I quizzed them about covering the caucuses there. Our sound person began to wax about it.
"It's great," he explained, "you get to see and hear the contenders and their campaigns up close. You also get to see the making , or in Dean's case the un-making, of a candidate. For example, I can tell you the moment that George W. became a candidate."
"When was that?" I saked.
"The moment is campaign bought a telepromter." I laughed.
"No, seriously," he continued, "I saw him without it and he was horrible and couldn't form complete sentences. The moment they gave him a teleprompter he sounded like a candidate and could 'connect' with his audience."
Thus the fate of the free world has been decided, in part, by the teleprompter.

Naughty Quip

From profound wisdom to spurious wordplay. I've mentioned elsewhere my love for unusual pairings of words. The two word combination that leapt into my head the other day? PELVIC TURBULENCE.