Oracle of Mefi

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[oracleofmefi]

Life of A Sleepwalker: "Sometimes, I leave myself useful signs and symbols. Mostly, I am the ghost haunting my own house."

I've been a sleepwalker for as long as anyone in my family can remember. I talk in my sleep, sometimes at length, and usually in a sort of slow-motion narrative or series of questions posited to a sleepy bed-mate who'd almost certainly rather not be up, answering stupid questions, at three in the morning. My old window unit air conditioner used to make a little buzzing sound, so subtle you'd almost miss it, but in my sleep, I'd hear it and get up, get out my toolbox, clear a space, and carefully dismantle the unit, laying out the pieces one by one as I dug down into the guts of the machine. "Joe, come back to bed." "I need to get this opened up. There's another bird caught in the air conditioner." "There's not another bird in the air conditioner, Joe." "Yeah, there is. Don't you hear it? I don't want it to get hurt." "I think I heard it fly back out again. Come back to bed." "Are you sure?" "Yes." "That's good. I don't want that bird to get hurt." That air conditioner finally wore out after twenty years of interrupted service. By the end, it was all held together with duct tape and drywall screws, where the original parts had fallen apart from being unscrewed and screwed back in. The new one is nice, and does not have a bird in it, as far as I can tell. I've left this one alone for two years now. I spent years, in the nineties, back when I had my last ongoing serious relationship, waking up, shaking my partner awake, and telling him my pet ground squirrel, Alice, was in bed with us, running around in the bed linens, and that I had to get her out so we wouldn't roll over and crush her. He'd sigh and follow the drill, climbing out of bed with a pillow, to watch me while I meticulously unfurled each sheet and blanket, shaking them out and smoothing them over with my hands. At some time in this process, Alice would always look over, sitting in her tank, and would then start running on her wheel, which made a long, whining squeak that never failed to alert me to her true status. "Alice isn't even in the bed. She's in her cage." "Yes, Joe, I know." "Was she in there all along?" "Yes, Joe. She is always in there." "Really? That's a hell of a thing. Well, at least the bed's all tidy now." "Get back in bed, please." Most of what happens is sort of standard obsessive-compulsive cleaning, tidying, and preparation, but sometimes, I get up and assemble things into strange tableaus—spice jars in circles and little pyramids in the kitchen, the shower curtain folded into inexplicable origami. Sometimes, I leave myself useful signs and symbols. Mostly, I am the ghost haunting my own house. I've been lucky, I guess, in that the Sleeper is benign and helpful, albeit in odd ways. Back in college, I'd get stressed out over tests, studying until the wee hours and keeling over, surrounded by books and papers, sideways on the bed, and then I'd wake up to find that I'd tidied up, packed my knapsack for the morning, showered, shaved, and dressed. As satisfying as the time savings were back then, I could not help but feel somewhat alarmed that I could stand in a shower and not wake myself up. You wonder, I suppose, about what could happen. It's like the fear I used to have about going on school field trips to Washington, D.C., where we'd all get off the bus and pile onto the Metro. I'd stand there at the platform, looking down at the third rail, and worry that I'd get some wild, uncontrollable impulse, just as the train was coming in, and jump onto the tracks. I've since learned that that's a pretty common fear, and has a name, which escapes me at the moment, but you wonder about those things, about if you have the capacity of doing something sudden and destructive for no obvious reason. I think, in a way, I'm lucky in that my Sleeper has had a patient series of trainers, from my family to my two ex-partners, all of whom, once over the obnoxious novelty of finding me wandering around at night, managed to respond in ways that cultivated more self-regulation and introspection. It's all conjecture, of course—I barely know the guy, even though he's bathed me and made me breakfast and made sure all my squirrels and birds are okay—but I suspect we have a good working relationship. If the Sleeper represents some sort of inner aspiration or ambition, I have to be glad that my secret desire is to have OCD and take care of animals and spice jars and not go on a bloodcurdling hacking spree or something worse. The doubt, though, is why I so often follow the old gay seventies motto—in bed by midnight, home by two. It's just easier than explaining to some strange person, or to someone I'd dated a time or two, exactly why I'm taking their air conditioner apart in the middle of the night. "Did you hear a bird in there?" "Holy shit! GET OUT!"

posted by sonascope at 12:53 on June 26, 2010

[oracleofmefi]

"Star Trek saved our family"

My 13-year-old son and I are watching every Star Trek right now and it is a fantastic experience. In fact it has repaired out relationship. My son has been acting up in school and at home since he was 8 or 9. A nice kid but too smart for his own good, too easily frustrated, too easily distracted. And is it helpful that he loves attention and is great at making people laugh? No it is not. The last five years have been tough, with regular phone calls and notes home from various principals and school counselors, pleas from teachers to get the boy to settle down, hints of ADHD or Asperger's or whatever the diagnosis du jour. We put him in a private school we could not really afford in hopes a more challenging environment would straighten him out. He was expelled in the 6th grade for his constant low-grade disruptions of class and the complaints of other parents. Out of options, we turned to home schooling. That too was problematic with constant monitoring needed to keep him on track.  Last summer, when the boy was 12, he asked me to look at something on the computer. "I can tell they are making fun of someone--like when people imitate Arnold Schwarzenegger--but I don't know who it is." He showed me some Youtube video game walk through. The narrator was doing a lazy Shatner impression, biting off each word: “Now. You. Go. Through. This. Door...” “He is imitating William Shatner playing James T. Kirk. You know, the captain in Star Trek,” I told Sam. “Do you mean Star Wars?” Sam asked. I jumped up in alarm. “Son, go straight to the living room!” I commanded. “Fire up Netflix! Summer school is in session.” We fell in love with Star Trek. I had not watched the original series of Star Trek since I was not much older than Sam, and I had forgotten that the original series was as much about philosophy and the events of the 1960s as it was about science or adventure. Every episode was a conversation starter, and gave us a neutral ground to talk, from topics like race relations, the rights of individuals versus the good of the many, sexism, the environment. We also had our favorites--my son liked Spock and Sulu the best of all the characters, I preferred Kirk and McCoy. And as a boy entering his teenage years, my son was very interested in the mini skirted female crew members and Green Orion slave girls. We inhaled the series like so many bags of popcorn, some days watching four or five episodes in a row. “Just one more?” the boy would ask standing between me and the clock on the wall. Why not? One night on his way up to bed he said something I had not heard in years--”I love you Dad!” “I love you too,” I managed to get out before my voice broke. We decided to watch everything labeled Star Trek ever made. We moved on to Next Gen and then to Deep Space Nine. At some point I realized that I had committed to over 500 episodes of television and 11 movies, but I had made a promise, and beside we were having fun.  From the detente of Star Trek a general household peace blossomed. We got a lot less attitude and a lot more cooperation, and so we were perhaps more understanding and supportive, and positive energy just snowballed. My son became more patient and far slower to anger. The therapist noticed the change. "Star Trek!" we explained. A few months ago my son decided he wanted to go back to public school, and even entering midyear he is doing really well. His therapist suggested that we are about done with therapy.  So there you have it--Star Trek saved our family. We just finished DS9 and are moving into Voyager. By the end of summer we will be done. That is OK though, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, and other series should carry us through his teenage years.

posted by LarryC to Metafilter at 3:02 on May 16, 2013

[oracleofmefi]

"My turkeys. My aerodynamic turkeys. Let me tell you about them."

My turkeys. My aerodynamic turkeys. Let me tell you about them. I wanted turkeys because I was jealous of a friend's home-raised 34-pound Thanksgiving dinner, and because my husband and I already had chickens, and, you know, because how hard could it be? They'd strut around all day, preening and looking like those cheesy wall decorations from grade school. They'd stand there, being turkeys, but--saved from a factory life--they'd gratefully peck at scratch and entertain me with their adorable gobbles. Then I'd find someone to cut their heads off and then we'd have dinner, the end. Turkeys! Badass! In fact, NO. My nine birds (six Royal Palms and three Narragansetts) eat, poop copiously, roost on the fence and in the trees, and visit the neighbor's front door first thing in the morning. Because, hooray, THEY CAN FLY. Unlike their factory-raised brethren, these heritage turkeys have a lot of room to move around and have retained their ability to clear a six-foot fence, which we had deemed high enough to keep them in. It sags these days because the birds sleep on it at night and they wake up and they're like, "Hey, I don't see any fence, let's go to Denny's!" And they're off. I walk out at about 6:45 a.m. and round them up out of the grapes or the barnyard or off the roof of the truck, and walk behind them in a forward-moving arc, swooping left then right to drive them toward the pen door, all the while saying "Turkeys, GO FASTER. I need my coffee!" They oblige. I go inside and have coffee. They've escaped again before I finish my first cup. The second or third round, they've made it clear up to the barnyard, and they're menacing the chickens. I stand by the open pen door and yell, "TURKEYS! Get in here!" And because they run downhill, they take to the air, and I am surrounded by a whoosh of flying turkeys as they round me, and the corner, and go back in their fenced accommodations. Now you're asking me why I don't just clip their wings on one side, which would be a great idea if not for my dog. My bird-rustling, turkey-killing dog, who snatches them out of the air like so many Frisbees. Recently, he dug his way into the pen--twice--and if the birds hadn't flown the coop, they would have been dead meat. (As an aside, I mean that literally: they escaped by flying on top of the coop and over the fence. I used to have 10 turkeys until the pain-in-the-ass dog snuck an early Thanksgiving dinner. All that was left afterwards was a single, scaly claw.) The turkey pen is, for various reasons which seemed good at the time, close to the barn and is within the dog's territory, so the birds see the dog EVERY DAY. He has chased them, harassed them, chewed on them, and STILL they randomly decide that they're going to break out and go smoke ciggies behind the barn, and suddenly I hear barking and a great gobbling, and there I am again, running outside, shouting "GODDAMMIT, OFF! NO EATING THE TURKEYS, DOG! FUCKING DOG, OFF THE TURKEYS!" I put the dog in his crate and I herd the turkeys in, and they look at me evilly, like, "You're not the boss of us, nuh-uh. Ooooh, look shiny object full of water, quick, over there!" Not much brain there. So I won't feel quite as bad about cutting their heads off. Because yeah, there's one old guy in the area who will process turkeys. Or so we hear. He might be dead or in a home by now. So, most likely, I'll be standing outside in my blaze orange coveralls holding my turkeys' feet as my husband wields the ax. If he shoots them instead, I'll be the one gathering up the carcases and learning, in a hurry, how to pluck and de-gizzard them. All nine of them. All *he* can talk about is building a flight pen next time around. Next time? Oh my God, I'll be lucky if I make it to Thanksgiving with my sanity. Because every time I walk past the pen, I obsessively count to nine in waltz-time, in groups of three, to reassure myself they're all accounted for; I slip on turkey poop outside the front door; I see them driven before me and hear the lamentation of their gobbles; I run hell for leather through the pasture in my Crocs and jammies, trying to save the hindmost bird from the dog's jaws. This is the new normal. And that's what happens when you turn around to your husband, with envy in your heart and no foresight in your mind, and say "TURKEYS. I MUST HAVE THEM!"

posted by MonkeyToes to Metafilter at 1:21 on October 8, 2011

[oracleofmefi]

Visiting The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: "In this place your every sense is false, your most trusted feelings lead you astray. It’s a deeply creepy experience."

As I mentioned, I've been to the exclusion zone. It was an intense experience (arguably literally). I could talk about it for hours, so I'll try to keep it to just things that really stood out to me. Firstly, about the disaster itself: One of things I learned is that it's a much bigger deal than I assumed, and while we think of it as something that happened, it didn't - it is something that is happening. Largely out of sight, out of mind. Chernobyl was a disaster so massive that it collapsed a global superpower and changed the world. (Here in the USA, we prefer to credit Reagan and ourselves with that.) When the reactor exploded, people initially didn't realize there was any radiation leak, because their geiger counters were so overloaded that they didn't function. When they figured out that there was a radiation leak - that it was big enough to saturate their geiger counters, they figured they should rapidly do some essentials and get out within a few hours. They didn't realize that the radiation was not merely beyond the saturation point of their instruments, but orders of magnitude beyond that point. They died. When trying to contain areas of contamination (not clean it up - merely to slow it spreading further), a small mountain of super-contaminated debris needed to be moved off the roof. The area was so radioactive that robots couldn't operate there - the circuitry would succumb to the radiation and fail. So they had to use people. Thousands and thousands of people.  Think about that. It touches on a recurring theme in Chernobyl - problems so huge and intractable that there is nothing that can be done, yet the stakes are so high that doing nothing is absolutely not an option, so... something has to be done, and the cost is unthinkable. (The official deathtoll is low, but is a political number. The actual deathtoll is vastly larger) The exclusion zone is an area the size of Massachusetts, too contaminated for human settlement, sealed off from the world for quarter of a century.  It's about two hours drive north of Kiev. Some of the guides who take visitors to the exclusion zone show them this documentary during the trip. Take a look. The trip itself... too much to talk about.  The perimeter of the Exclusion Zone is serious and sobering. It's guarded by soldiers with machine guns. Part of their job is to stop people entering. Part of their job is to make sure nothing leaves. In many areas you will need to be accompanied by a military escort. Inside is a land without people, a city slowly being consumed by the earth. Stay on the concrete. The concrete is constantly washed down by the rain, so it's safer, cleaner. The soil and plants in contrast, absorb and store the fallout. My meters easily confirm this. Don't put your camera down. If it (or anything else) gets contaminated and can't be sufficiently cleaned, it won't be allowed out of the Zone. They don't want a scene if they have to take your expensive toys. The contamination is not uniform. It could be quite safe to stand over here, and only 100 yards away, decidedly unsafe! This means that with a guide and/or geiger counter, you can move about and see things without the kind of risk you might expect, while at the same time, it's still a very bad place for almost any kind of human activity. Contaminated vehicles. As cars, trucks, tanks, and aircraft are used in the zone, they become contaminated and must be abandoned there. I approach a military tank/APC, and my geiger counter starts buzzing. This thing has been washed countless times - hundreds perhaps. It has stood in the rain and the sun and the wind, scoured clean by the elements for decades, until even the paint is stripped from the steel, yet nothing can clean it of the contamination. With each step closer that I take, the radiation reading on my scintillatordoubles the reading from my previous step. (I decide that three steps is enough of that, I'll keep my distance!) Speaking of geiger counters - I can't find a good example, but the clicking sound is eerie. The associations are of cold-war measurement of horror. I am travelling with some others. We have counters, so I am surrounded by a 3D space of eriee clicks emanating from all around me. As we drive, the clicking intensifies. Suddenly all around me the clicks are going frantic. Then an alarm goes off, then another, within two seconds, every geiger counter is sounding alarms. The feeling is almost primal: Get out! Get out of this place! I am walking in a modern city with no people. It seems familiar, I realize that what I see is reminding me of a scene from "I am Legend" - the overgrown prairies of New York City, overgrown grasslands amidst the crumbling office towers. (Outside the city, there is no shortage of Mad Max either. Giant rusting ruins of a lost people litter the land.) I look at a tree growing through a cracked tile - the tree and I are six stories above ground, in a hotel. Wind-blown seeds are carried through long-gone windows, and trees take root and grow. Their roots enlarge cracks in the concrete, which will allow water to seep in. The water will further crack and break down the concrete, exposing the steel, allowing it to rust. Piece by piece, the structure will fall apart, until it collapses, becoming rocks in the soil of a forest where once there stood a city. Already, some areas of the city are so overgrown that it looks like a forest. But walk a dozen yards that way, and hidden just beyond the greenery you'll discover... a city apartment block! I am in a time machine. The USSR disappeared from our world over 20 years ago, yet here I stand - in the USSR. Shelves of books, film reels, newspapers (dated 1986), artifacts and appliances of the era. All still here, gathering dust. Mostly untouched. (Some areas anyway. Other areas are heavily looted. Of the hundreds or thousands of vehicles so contaminated they had to be abandoned, I'm told almost all have the hood open - the engine missing. Smugglers come into the zone, to find things of value to sneak out and sell to unsuspecting buyers. The similarities to Roadside Picnic and STALKER are striking) Walking through classrooms. Little models made of paper by children are still here. As is everything else, desks to homework. Child-sized gasmasks too. Feeling like a schoolboy breaking the rules, I sneak into the teacher-only room behind the classroom. Masses of teaching supplies. Models, keepsakes, books, hand-written notes. Most of the building, items have fallen or are strewn around. With every step, a dozen fascinating artifacts of another time just crunch underfoot. All of it has been here for over 20 years. But as the plants invade the structure, the roof will eventually crack and leak, and then all these things will be destroyed and turned into soil within months of the arrival of water. Everything is still here because the structure has kept it dry all these years. It is spring. New luscious green growing everywhere. With nature reclaiming the land, wild and fresh and clean, the Zone is beautiful.  All you see is beauty, it's all you can smell, your senses are delighted. What a wonderful place! But your instrument is beeping and buzzing a different story. That's the conflict - only your instruments say "Danger!" - your instincts say otherwise.  In this place your every sense is false, your most trusted feelings lead you astray. It's a deeply creepy experience.

posted by -harlequin- to Metafilter at 3:38 on December 14, 2010

[oracleofmefi]

Why sociology is important

Next time people ask why sociology is important, I'm going to show them this video.  On its own, when you see one person slip, you automatically assume that person slipped, was clumsy or not playing attention. But when you look at the aggregate, you realize that the failure isn't on the individual at all, rather the structures that cause certain people to fail with almost no fault of their own. And yet, without this data, they will very quickly ascribe the mistake to themselves.  It difficult to explain to someone that the reason they live their life the way they do because of the structures built to help them live that way. But imagine, instead of a stupid mislaid step, the faulty structure is a punitive late policy on a credit card, or a bank that has a minimum balance fee and very quickly the maintenance of the status-quo is laid bare.

posted by JimmyJames at 1:19 on June 28, 2012

[oracleofmefi]

Surviving Sarajevo: "Within the domain of those trapped in the city, civility greatly increased"

Well, unlike the majority of you (I assume), I actually lived several years in a period of savagery and killing, during which nothing - food, water, electricity, phone, clothing, sense of safety, school, the ability to go out in public, etc - was available, except during totally unpredictable, brief and sporadic occasions.  Of those who couldn't leave my city, Sarajevo: Some people (very few) were prepared for what they thought would be the "long haul" - this tended to be a couple of months. These people were widely seen as lunatics and dangerously pessimistic ones at that. Most people were not at all prepared. This included my family. Many of those - like my family - considered the idea of "preparation" to be an affront to the decency we felt most people possessed. Were we wrong? Well, I don't know. We suffered greatly; my parents were killed. But speaking only for myself, I never felt I cheapened my soul by betting on calamity. Today, that still feels like it's worth something. But here's the main point: "Preparing" for the disaster really didn't do anyone much good. Those who "prepared" ate a little better for a while. They stayed warmer for a few extra days. They enjoyed the radio for a while longer (via batteries.) But in the end, they ended up hungry, cold and bored too, just like the rest of us. Guns and weapons helped no one directly and were even of little to no use in the defense of Sarajevo, since they were toys compared to the shells, bombs and high-powered armaments of the attacking forces. The worst parts of war were psychological - the fear, anxiety, boredom, loneliness, paranoia, bad dreams. Respite from those things came with sharing food with a neighbor, finding a piece of clothing that would fit someone you knew, commiserating with others in your position, figuring out how to make make-up from brick or french fries from wheat paste and spreading this newly-acquired war knowledge around the mahala. We knew who had extra food and supplies. For the most part, they weren't attacked or hassled or bothered. Contrary to what these survivalists say, those in dire times generally hold on to their personal sense of pride even more than they do in normal times. I'd take a bite of a friend's salad without bothering to ask in normal times. I'd never have done that in wartime, no matter how hungry I was.  Within the domain of those trapped in the city, civility greatly increased. You often hear how Holocaust survivors felt guilt at surviving. Well, during war, that was a feeling everyone was aware of - people started dying right away (my parents were killed near the start of the siege, for instance) - and there was a palpable enough common sense of karma to make everyone into good Samaritans. None of us understood why we survived while others didn't. I shared food when I had it, even though I often knew I wouldn't have a crumb the next day. Which was no big achievement, because nearly everyone did the same. Those who'd prepared, well, the majority of them shared their food and whatever else they had as soon as someone else was clearly in need. I can't swear it, but I think they felt a little foolish to have been so self-obsessed, and giving away that stuff might have lessened that feeling. There were a few people who hoarded things until they ran out of stuff - eventually everybody ran out of anything worth hoarding - and they soon became wishful beggars like the rest of us. Again, I can't swear it, but I hear stories, and it seems that these people suffer from post-war trauma, guilt and nightmares more than the rest of us. Those survivalists, I feel sorry for them. It's no way to live.

posted by Dee Xtrovert at 5:33 on January 29, 2009

[oracleofmefi]

A boy's first, perfect, baseball game

I was at the game today. My wife and I haven't really gone out of our way to expose the kids to sports. My oldest is three, so it's not like he's at an age where sports are typically even interesting, but neither me nor my wife watch spectator sports. I grew up totally into baseball and played through high school, but pretty much lost interest when I became a pot smoking anarchist hippy in college.  But one day not too long ago, my son started talking all about baseball. I think he must have seen a game going on at the local park or something. We always jump right on anything that the kids express an interest in. Started putting a few games on TV. Bought him a Giants hat that he hasn't taken off in 3 months. He has a foam bat and even a little glove and every day when I come home from work, I'm greeted immediately at the door. "Daddy, you want to play baseball with me? I'll be pitcher, you be batter. I wear my Giants hat and you be the Brewers." So we're driving home from the airport a month ago, past Safeco field, and I explain that's where the Seattle team plays.  He looks at me with a very serious tone: "Daddy, I want to go see the Seattle team play at Safeco field." And he doesn't stop talking about it for days.  So I arrange a day off work, and buy the best seats still available for August 15th when the Rays are in town. Right behind the home team dugout. When they arrive in the mail (I have a funny feeling, I'll want actual ticket stubs from this and pay the extra $3 to get real tickets instead of electronic ones), I sit down next to him "Hey buddy, check this out, these are two tickets for you and me to go see the Seattle team play next week." He is flipping out all week. I buy him a little replica jersey which hasn't come off yet. "We're gonna eat popcorn, and sing the national anthem, and I'm going to bring my baseball glove and catch a ball!" He's telling everyone at school, at the park, family members.  We arrive at the game early enough to catch batting practice and the day does not disappoint. Like most three year olds, he usually loses interest in whatever he's doing after 30 minutes and I am prepared for an early exit. But he gets his big tub of popcorn, and he'senthralled, actually cheering and shouting "Hit the ball over here, Saunders!" He's getting a little tired by the sixth inning but then they do the little hydroplane race thing on the Diamond Vision and he's right back in it. He knows the words to "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" at the seventh inning stretch. He picks out a Mariners cap for his baby brother from a vendor. By the eighth inning, Hernandez is on fire, and the excitement is building. I think he struck out something like 7 of the last 8 batters he faced. My son has no idea what a perfect game is or how rare they are, but the rising excitement and wild cheering with each pitch is reflected and amplified by the boy.  At the last called strike, the crowd goes wild and the team is jumping up and down, giving each other hugs not 10 yards in front of us. My boy is getting high fives from all the people around us including the Mariners Moose and the people sitting in the row behind us who tell me my kid is the cutest, luckiest kid ever. Perfect game, indeed. So I do the natural thing and call my dad on the way home to tell him about our day. He reminds me that he took me to my first baseball game in 1973 when Vida Blue, pitching for the Oakland A's, threw a no-hitter against the Minnesota Twins. I was three years old at the time and had recently and inexplicably expressed an interest in baseball to my father.

posted by Slarty Bartfast at 5:16 on August 16, 2012

[oracleofmefi]

Force Majeure Plagiarism

This seems as good a place as any to tell the cautionary tale of what happened to my sister (a legitimate Harvard grad!) when, as a TA, she discovered one of her student's own acts of plagiarism. It was the fall of 1989, and my sister was a Ph.D. student in history at Berkeley, specializing in 18th-century Britain. For one of her class's assignment, a student turned in work that seemed... familiar. Strangely familiar. Indeed, personally familiar -- because not only had he plagiarized material that my sister had read, he had plagiarized material that her mentor had published just a few months earlier. But not only that: he had plagiarized the portion of the article that my sister herself had researched, and for which she had been specificallythanked in the acknowledgments for having uncovered. Well! If ever there was a chance to read someone the riot act, this was it -- and my sister was just the woman to do it. So she called the student in to her office hours, which (due to lack of office space at the history department) she held at a cafe near campus, and proceeded to inform him in no uncertain terms that he A) was CAUGHT; B) would FLUNK the class; C) was going to be reported to the dean for possible EXPULSION; and D) was OUT OF HIS FUCKING MIND if he thought she wouldn't notice that he'd plagiarized her own goddamn work. It was somewhere between points C and D that there was a rumbling sound, and the ground began to shake. Did my sister's rage truly know no bounds? Possibly! But more likely it was because a 6.9-magnitude earthquake had just begun. My sister -- who had never been in a major earthquake before -- froze. Her student, a native Californian, grabbed her and pulled her under the table just as the cafe windows shattered inward.  Ten seconds passed. Silence, except for the tinkling of glass.  "Boy, you really were pissed," he said. "Just rewrite the paper and we'll call it even," she said.

posted by scody at 23:06 on May 18, 2010

[oracleofmefi]

Emperor Trajan and The Calibri: The Battle of Helvetica

> "I always thought Garamond sounded like a weapon name." In the fourth year of the reign of Emperor Trajan, my legions were attacked by the Calibri in the hills of Helvetica. The canny tribesmen made their assault before we could reach and lay siege to the city of Gentium, thereby rendering useless our trebuchets and high towers. My couriers soon reported that the Calibri, as was their normal habit, had assembled a force of light cavalry, clad in copperplate gothic and armed with arials, while also bearing short onyx used for close-in fighting. They relied on speed and maneuverability in the rough terrain, using their arials to fire flaming caslons into our midst and then retreating. A generation ago, this tactic would have wrought grievous damage. But by the grace of the gods, this was a more modern era, and I was able to deploy a force of heavy infantry, armored in stout verdana and armed with the new garamonds. No cavalry, however fleet, can stand long against a trained force armed with garamonds. So this I say to the fools who have said that our armies have fewer meliors and sylfaens than they have at any time since the war with the Lucida Sans. We have no need of such toys now. Those are the weapons of the old Rome – a century old style. And these are the Times New Roman.

posted by kyrademon to Metafilter at 19:33 on October 23, 2012

[oracleofmefi]

Lewis's Law

Lewis's Law: "Comments on any article about feminism justify feminism."

posted by mcwetboy to MetaTalk at 18:38 on June 20, 2013

[oracleofmefi]

My Dad The Vietnam Vet: "The HELL it did! This mother fucker will not STAND! Show me this machine!" He yelled.

Okay. My dad is a 'Nam vet. He was an officer in 5th and 7th Special Forces. Lt. Colonel. D. C. Christensen. When I was a kid the man was always bigger than life. But I suppose most kids feel that way about their dads. But in many ways he was really bigger. From a family of the west. A family of some real tough ranchers, farmers and hard scrabble Mormons used to scratching out a life in the wilderness. And he was in the Green Beret. So it's only now I realize my childhood was not typical.  I've told the story of eating iguana at Christmas when we were stationed in Panama. I've told the stories of how, when my family was stationed in Vietnam, I was conceived during a Vietcong mortar attack on the local theater thus predisposing me to behaving soft spot for agrarian Marxism and Ho Chi Min. But this story is after this larger than life man got back from the war. And he was broken. My father last tour in 'Nam the family got to spend living in Europe. In England.We were there before he got his last set of orders and he didn't want to uproot us. He knew the Army, and Nixon, was desperate. So he played them for all he was worth. Keeping us in the best off-base housing in a little village in England while he went and helped with the pullout of the Special Forces guys in 'Nam. When the war looked to be over the jig was up. He called us and told us the Army wanted us the hell out of there and back in the States. He would meet us in New Jersey and we would drive, another typical army family long cross continental drive, all the way to Denver. The Army wouldn't even pay for a through flight. We were used to this sort of thing. But I imagine my mother wasn't happy. Coordinating moving from over-seas three kids (two totally uncompromising teenagers and me, a little scrawny weirdo) and a dog and meeting up with the man she loved without so much as the guarantee of a roof over our heads. The man she had not seen in almost two years. But it was such a relief to know he was finally safe after dreaming , every single night while he was gone, that a bullet had found him. Or worse.  It's true. As a kid I dreamt about my dad nearly every single night while he was gone. Horrible dreams of death in the wet green places of the world. And sometimes I'd sleep with a picture becuase I couldn't remember his face sometimes. Anyway. When we finally got to the airport in the states my dad had been there for a couple weeks, actually. I've learned that was becuase he needed so much medical treatment. And he needed time to decompress. A thing they never told us until we were grown up. But my mom and us ids we hadn't seen him until that moment. It was weird. We had been so "typical" on the trip. Bickering. Petulant. But then you could feel the man presence at the gate. My sister, who'd dropped acid nearly every day of her senior year had become a serious problem child to point of even joining a cult briefly, was first to run to him and I couldn't see him. There were so many people. When you a kid all you see is legs. And then the crowd parted and clapped a little. My mom and my dad were kissing. A soldier and his wife. Kissing. Like high schoolers. But there was something. Something wrong. And when she let go and he bent down toward me I was a little afraid. The man I knew was so diminished. He was a skull set on top of stick placed inside a baggy dress uniform. His eyes were watery and so hollow. The pale blue of them glowed in the dark of the sockets. I could smell his Bay Rum aftershave over mildew. I could feel the rough sunburned skin of his face against me. His arms were iron. And my fear melted. "I got you a Robot in Hong Kong." He said. And out of his bad he pulled a the toy. And walked all five us to go get our dog out of quarantine. Two cars. The VW Van we shipped back from England and the American Motors Ambassador he bought from his "blood money." Two cars and a family of six. Inclusing Ralph, our spaniel. That was our caravan. There are many stories I could tell about that drive to Denver. (Like my dad liberating our dog himself— regardless of the official quarantine for shipping pets. And nobody stopped him going back to the pet shipping area. And he called "Ralph!" only twice before our dog's distinctive howl brought my dad right to him and he pulled open the crate bare handed and walked the dog out the door without a leash or so much as signing a form. Nobody was gonna fuck with him.) But I'm gonna skip ahead. He was not well. He would witch and jump and the slightest sound. He could only drive a few hours at a time and he'd get confused and would need to go into the back of the VW van and sleep. He had terrible fevers and would yell in his sleep. When we got to Denver my dad had a couple of months before he started his job and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. His new less stressful job helping America prepare for thermonuclear war. It was big of the Army to give him a couple of months down time. We had standing orders. If dad leaves the house alert mom no matter where she was. But he never left the house. He spent most of is in the basement of our house on Hudson Street in Denver, sleeping int he cool dark. Occasionally we'd see him in his bathrobe, like a ghost, awake just long enough to grab some food out of the fridge. Or sometimes he would soak in the tub for a couple of hours. Until the water would get so cold he would be blue. He's sit in the freezing water. Staring. Until my mom would gently bring him round and help him back to bed. But he'd always get up in the middle of the night and pace the house. And then go to the basement to sleep during the day. Except one day. It was the fourth of July. My mother told us to look out for him. To remind him of what day it was and there was gonna be fireworks. She had warned the nieghbors. A couple of days previous a neighbor kid shot off a bottle rocket over our garage while we were watching TV. All I remember is my dad running in grabbing my mother over his shoulder and throwing her down on top of us and pulled the couch over on all five of us while dog barked. That was just a sample. My mom had gone and collected an array of tranquilizers. Which he took by the fist full. With whiskey. It made his eyes swim around in his head. And it made him deliriously happy.  He would sometimes dance little jigs in the kitchen with the dog or who ever was handy. And sing randomly from musicals like Oliver or Paint Your Wagon. "Eyeeeeeee Wazzzz buh-orrrnnn under a wah-drenn Starrr!" At the top of his lungs and happy as a clam. He would give me my allowance. 10 times per day. We'd shoot baskets for hours on end. Him in his bathrobe and cowboy boots. But it was near the fourth of July. And then a firecracker would go off. And he rush through the house to find a bomb shelter. Or to look for his war kit. Some times when there was a couple of bangs he dive behind a couch and from behind it would bark orders at me and my friends,while we sat watching cartoons, to "quit fucking around and start returning fire!" Luckily my mom had had the for-thought to hide his ammo and clips. This sounds cruel. But honestly, just being a kid, I thought this was hilarious. So I'd bring friends over to watch. Unfortunately my our closest neighbor kid was Micheal Yim. An Asian kid. My dad would occasionally speak to him in Vietnamese. "I'm Korean." Micheal would say, annoyed. My dad would reply "Wrong war." One other thing we would do is just say "Nixon." And no matter what room in the house he was in he would yell "GOD DAMNED NIXON!" No matter how many times you did it, he would yell back, like an angry echo, "GOD DAMNED NIXON!" We'd do this until my mother would herd us out side. "Jesus Wept! Don't you have anything better to do." The fourth passed with only a couple more incidents. But through it I had amassed quite a war chest of ill-gotten allowance money. And I was living large. I go across the street to a little drug store, Oscars Drugs, and buy cokes and cookies for everybody in the neighbor hood (there is related story of years earlier of me finding a large sum of cash under my parent bed — my dad was acting paymaster for a few months— that I then treated all the neighborhood girls to ice cream from the ice cream man). The coke machine was a central gathering point on hot days. All the kids would lean their bikes next to it and we would drink our cokes while shot the shit or we dared each other to run across the lava-hot black top of the drugstore parking lot barefoot. This coke machine was kind that had bottles that you pulled out. Bottled coke was so much better. One day I put in my quarter. Nothing. The bottle would pull free. No biggie. I was LOADED. So I put in another. Wouldn't budge. So I put in another. Nada. I was out of quarters. This was common with this particular machine. We had complained to the drug store but he had ignored us. So I said let's go get some more money from my dad. So we rode back home. All the meds my dad had been on had run their course and at this point started to conflict with each other in his brain. It being the early seventies he compensated with more booze. My dad sat in the basement watching foot ball with the sound off. We came running down stairs and I worked up some tears. "Dad. The coke machine stole my money!" He looked at me and his face just began to vibrate. Vibrate red. "WHAT!"  "The c..coke machine at Oscars stole me quarter and..." "The HELL it did! This mother fucker will not STAND! Show me this machine!" He yelled. My friends started to back away and run up the stairs. You could almost hear the gaskets blowing in my dads noodle. "Uh... the one just across the street at Oscars!" "SON OF A BITCH!" And he was off. It was like all the injustice of the world was at that drug store and had to be confronted. He was out the door before I could get up the stairs. I heard it slam. We had standing orders to get mom. But there was dad. In his bathrobe and cowboy boots marching to war with the Coke Machine across the street. He had escort of neighborhood kids n bikes flanking him. My plan had backfired. "MOM!" She came out from the backyard where she had been hanging laundry or something. And I just pointed out the window to my dad had now just about to reach the corner by the drug store. "Oh dear" She said. I ran after him. But by the time I rounded the corner my father was already in middle of landing dozens of punches to the coke machine. While he swore at it and told it that one way or another he was gonna get his kids quarter back and why not make easy on everybody and just hand over the coke. Then he started with the drop kicks. He'd run at the machine and kick it with his whip thin skeletal white legs. Oddly my greatest fear was that the neighbor hood would catch a glimpse of his testicles through his robe and loose boxer shorts. Apparently they were more transfixed by the ever escalating violence he was perpetrating on the Cocoa Cola Company. Punch. Punch. Kick. Kick. And occasionally head butt. My mom got there. About the same time as the cops and the drug store owner. My mom spoke gently to him. The cops just stood back as one of the nieghbors informed them that my dad was a 'Nam Vet. They just stood back like " Hey. We're good." Waiting for my father to gas out. However the coke machine broke before that happened. And my dad started pulling out bottles and handing them to all the little kids who had gathered. "YAAAAAAAY! Mr. CHRISTENSEN! YAAAAYYYY!" They yelled. To them he was the coolest folk hero ever. Some change spilled out. My dad picked up a coin and gave it to me. "Buy them from some place else next time." And he walked home, a skeleton in a bathrobe and cowboy boots, with the entire neighborhood in awe. The cops just let him go. My mom had her checkbook already out.

posted by tkchrist at 6:10 on November 12, 2008

[oracleofmefi]

Boys will be boys? Fuck that, teach them to respect women

it BAFFLES me that the response is always "oh, he likes you!" Like that's supposed to make constant harassment okay. There are few things that will make me snap faster than someone handwaving away harrassment towards preteen girls as "oh, that's just boys being boys!" NO. FUCK YOU. NOW IS THE TIME TO EDUCATE THEM ABOUT HOW TO BEHAVE LIKE DECENT HUMAN BEINGS.

posted by elizardbits to Metafilter at 17:34 on June 20, 2013

[oracleofmefi]

Modern western civilization is the shit

Apologies to Mr. Suelo, but modern western civilization is the shit I am by no means a rich man, but in comparison to most of the world and most humans who lived in any age preceding ours, I live like a king. By the mere accident of birth, I came to live in a country that bombards its citizens with comforts. I woke up this morning and put two cups of fresh, clean water into a metal pan and boiled it on my electric stove. I then stirred in some 7-grain porridge and some raisins and cooked up my breakfast. I didn't have to grow the grains and process them and I didn't have to grow the grapes and dry them into raisins - it all came from the store, packaged and ready to go! From the same store, I also obtained some butter without having to own a cow and some honey without having to put on an apiarist's suit and squeeze it out of a hive. I put the porridge and honey and butter into a ceramic bowl that I did not cast and stirred it all together with a metal spoon that I did not forge.  Scarcely half an hour after climbing out of my bed - that is, a queen-sized mattress supported by a boxspring and a metal frame, covered with flannel sheets that I did not and could not weave - I had prepared myself a delicious, nutritious breakfast. And I know how long it took because of the digital alarm clock sitting on my bookshelf - a bookshelf that is packed out with volumes on a wide variety of subjects which were written by learned men and women from all over the planet. Were I to pick up one of these books, I would find pages filled with words in clear, uniform type on smooth, machine-pressed paper. Their spines are sturdily bound and some of the covers have absolutely beautiful art or photographs printed on them. I could read it on my sofa while an electric fan controlled the temperature in my apartment and better see the pages by way of an electric light if I found the sunlight streaming in through my double-paned windows wanting. Fucking. Awesome. Instead, I decided to watch a DVD of Flight of the Conchords while I ate. A DVD player built in Taiwan streamed images of a sitcom filmed in New York, built around the act of a guitar-playing folk-satire duo from New Zealand into a cathode ray device built in China, all for my amusement. Once upon a time, only nobility got to be so entertained, and only then if they shipped in live performers. Today, a machine on a shelf above my television used a fucking laser to extract entertainment from a paper-thin disc, all because I pushed a few buttons on a small, infrared transmitter called a "remote control." Wow! No Pharaoh ever had it so good! I looked at Mr. Suelo's site for as long as I could stomach the sanctimony and noticed a number of quotes from luminaries of ages long dead. These quotes make for good copy, but I don't know how good a job they do of decrying our age and our currency, given that these people never saw it and never spent it. Is Suelo absolutely certain that Thoreau wouldn't have loved microwave popcorn? That Lincoln wouldn't have wanted the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy? He did fancy a play from time to time, after all. St. Augustine's piety was never, ever tested against central air conditioning or drive-thru burger joints. The folks who lived without money and modern comforts in ages gone by did so largely for lack of any other choice. People crave comfort and safety - greed is naught but an extreme expression of these universal needs. The average Roman legionnaire would have gladly killed to know the comforts of a Victorian and a Victorian would have done the same to enjoy the leisurely life of a modern American, same as I would to vault into the 24th century, where waste-processing nanites keep my large intestine clean and translator microbes in my Broca's region enable me to speak with anyone in the world as if we grew up with a common language. I'm aware that greed and sloth have us in a bit of a mess right now and I'm confident that greed will lead us back out. The energy problem won't be cracked because we all come together and build non-profit solar power co-ops. It'll happen when some greedy son of a bitch decides he wants in on the ground floor of The Industrial Revolution, Part Two - Green Electric Boogaloo. The modern world absolutely teems with marvels. In a couple hours, I'm gonna hop on my bike, a miracle of a machine with a fiberglass frame and rubber tires, and ride on paved, light-controlled roads to a job where I help disabled folks manage their lives. These guys have disabilities that would doom them in a fortnight in Mr. Suelo's ideal world. But thanks to modern medicine and machines, these men may live for much longer and in much more comfort than they ever could before. I know what a lucky bastard I am, living in the twenty-first century United States. I'm thankful to live in such a place, where a man with cerebral palsy can have orange juice whenever he pleases and even folks who elect to live in a goddamn cave get to wear sturdy boots and maintain a blog that the whole planet is welcome to read.

posted by EatTheWeak to Metafilter at 22:00 on July 26, 2009

[oracleofmefi]

Kinda not a persecuted minority at all

Man some people really, really, really want to be a persecuted minority but without all that being persecuted or being a minority stuff.

posted by The Whelk at 19:34 on August 2, 2012

[oracleofmefi]

Experiencing sexual harassment as a guy, realizing women deal with it daily

I have long held that the real reason for male homophobia is that some men are truly frightened there might be a group of people out there who will look at them and act towards them like they act towards women. Last year I was on a winter trip to NYC. I was in meetings all day, it was crazy cold and snowy out, and I was walking about 15 blocks after dinner to get some comfort food (a very specific ice cream) before going back to my hotel. Despite being 6'3", 200lbs, and male, I was in this terrible cold and vulnerable place, walking quickly and just hoping to get to my warm hotel room and away from everything that is slightly scary in NYC when it is dark and cold and you feel alone. I was walking down a dark avenue eating my ice cream when a dude came out of the shadows behind a stoop and just blurted out to me "hey, you want to have sex with me tonight?" a few inches from my face. It was jarring, I was already in a bad state of mind, and it freaked me out. I doubled my pace and even though I was 6 inches taller and 50lbs heavier, I was kind of terrified by the abruptness of his request, they way he dropped it on me, and whole weird sexual violence vibe of it all. I got to my hotel a few minutes later, got to my warm room and knew I'd get to fly home the next day. Then I realized that one creepy moment when I was feeling low is pretty much what a woman in NYC probably has to deal with daily, if not multiple times a day. It's super gross, super creepy, and made me feel absolutely awful for days. I totally turned a corner on street harassment that day and am constantly thinking about how shitty it is going to be when my own daughter has to deal with this shit.

posted by mathowie to Metafilter at 23:13 on June 20, 2013

[oracleofmefi]

The NYT: always in a state of restrained panic

The NYT always has to be in a state of restrained panic, two Pino Grises away from shaking thier head and muttering " I just dont't UNDERSTAND" in response to nothing. The actual topic doesn't really matter, the the encroaching fear that sells.

posted by The Whelk to Metafilter at 14:34 on June 21, 2013

[oracleofmefi]

Why there are so few linguists specializing in the Cthulhu Mythos

how do you all pronounce Nyarlathotep? *pronounce*!?  Are you insane?

posted by weston to Metafilter at 21:53 on June 20, 2013