August 2007 Archives

Seven years ago today, at some ungodly hour of the morning (Eastern Daylight Time), I departed Buffalo for my trek to Seattle to begin graduate school. I arrived in town four days later - Labor Day morning, a little before noon.

What a long, strange trip it's been.

Draft one of the thesis is complete! (Well, the text portion is, at least.) The next few days will be devoted to me making my little laptop cry while trying to do complex image manipulation in Photoshop and Illustrator, and then of course I still have to properly reference and footnote all the prior work that enabled me to do my own research.

The writing is sure to be butchered alive by my adviser, but that's why it's not the final submission...

The thesis rolls along, slowly but surely toward a finish line.

As predicted, updates here have essentially ground to a halt, since I'm not procrastinating from boring lab work and instead am throwing down rambling semi-coherent sentences instead. I'm happy to look back and see that I managed a full month of daily updates as I intended to do, and I will continue with Caturday updates even if nothing comes between them, although I do have many things to post - mostly I'm just trying to limit my distractions to get the real work done first.

Oh, and if you're looking to hire a geneticist let me know - I come quite reasonably priced.

Two of our former foster cats - Percy (L) and Django (R), dozing in the loft in our spare room - Mar 23, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

Whoever thought "Stumble It!" was a good marketing phrase for use on news articles and blog entries to promote using StumbleUpon's social bookmarking site is a moron.

Mishka (mom), Sabine, and Griffin - Aug 18, 2007 (click images to enlarge)

(yes, I know those wasn't their names in the last post. I've given up on editing it to denote further changes.)

Meet the new foster cats. Here is Sabine (left) and her mother, Tipsy (right). Tipsy came pre-named (though by the time you read this, it will probably have been changed.) They were surrendered at the Seattle Animal Shelter by their prior humans due to "moving out of state".

Update: Replace all instances of 'Tipsy' in the current article with 'Majka' (pronounced 'Majka'.)

If you took Tipsy Majka, added a white spot on her nose, performed a sex change, and added about another Tipsy Majka's worth of mass, she would be Jasper. Sabine will probably look similar when grown up, although her colors might be lighter.

This is Sabine's tuxedo-cat brother, Sebastian. (Another new name. The two of them were recorded at the shelter as 'kitten-F' and 'kitten-M'.)

Sabine again, this time without mother-cat-interference. These are essentially the only shots we got of the kittens that aren't a blur of fur. We may need to invest in strobes and high-speed film.

Their mission for the next few weeks is to plump up a bit, get snip-snipped, and then act cute and fuzzy to potential new humans. I think we'll be successful.

This morning while I was making my breakfast, Jasper started meowling excitedly at the back door and a mysterious chirping noise came from outside. I looked out in time to see a Steller's Jay rummaging around in my potted herbs, presumably digging for grubs or seeds. I've seen a few of them roosting in the nearby pines and madrona trees, screaming their harsh, crackly squawk out at all hours, but this was the closest to the door that I had seen any of them.

Unfortunately, on this shot the flash went off and startled the bird, sending him up to a nearby tree screaming at me the entire time.

Taken from our house, Queen Anne, Seattle, Washington - Aug 14, 2007 (click images to enlarge)

It was the monthly foster cat adoption event today, and much to our delight (and probably hers as well), Suki was adopted!

Wallingford, Seattle, WA - Aug 11, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

A reward is available to anyone who has information leading to the whereabouts of our summer or those who apparently kidnapped it and added it to the rest of the country's ongoing heat wave.

I'm not sure whether to be worried or hopeful...

Even carrots taste better at McDonald's, kids say

Anything made by McDonald's tastes better, preschoolers said in a study that powerfully demonstrates how advertising can trick the taste buds of young children.

Even carrots, milk and apple juice tasted better to the children when they were wrapped in the familiar packaging of the Golden Arches.

I see a brilliant plan in the future to feed kids McTofuburgers and Carrot McNuggets. Toss in a few toys that the kids haven't played with in years and have forgotten about, and we could solve the obesity epidemic thanks to one of the key causes!

Delia on the couch - Aug 2, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

Bridge victims: 'Homer,' mom, 'chatterbox'

Victims who died in the Minnesota bridge collapse Wednesday included a father nicknamed "Homer," a successful businesswoman, a "chatterbox" who "loved to smile and laugh," and a mother who dreamed of a cosmetics career.

I understand we're trying to sympathize with the families of these people, but seriously - "chatterbox"? The entire lede is a bit strange and disjointed.

There's nothing particularly special about this "thriller" which was released last year. Though the film involves computer hacking in a loose sense, the title has nothing to do with anything that actually takes place in the film and probably just sounded too good to pass up. Harrison Ford plays his typical gruff protagonist character (see also, Air Force One, all those Tom Clancy movies, and so forth) who has to defeat a band of brilliant evil men who are threatening him and his family.

The movie wastes no time setting up the plot other than to give one brief shot of Seattle to show us where the film is set (though it could have been set in Topeka as the setting had no bearing on the plot aside from letting them get away with a lot of dramatic rainy scenes), and about ten seconds of inexplicable hostile animosity between Ford and an otherwise underused Robert Patrick.

None of the characters undergo any character development to expand them beyond the one-dimensional stereotypes that are established in the few seconds of introduction. We've got the computer nerd, the dumb tough guy, the emotionally strong but physically weak child, the sorta-ditzy but smart secretary (who they try to use for comic relief in a few different ways), and of course the protective and..., and... uh, protective wife and mother. Ford's wife (played by Virginia Madsden) has nothing but cliched line after cliched line about wanting to protect her family while the bad guys sneer at her and refuse to give up their evil ways. There are a few scenes with her and her children that deserved to be cut but probably were saved since they were all so underused already. She also apparently had a subplot about being an architect, and I'm really not sure where they were going with that.

Virtually the entire first half of the movie acts as blatant foreshadowing and set-up for later events, such as an inexplicable conversation about leaving the collar on the dog, and a long early bit about a remote-control car which leaves hints that Ford is an electrical engineering genius (or something.) There are even a few scenes that defy justification unless parts of the script were later cut, such as a few long conversations about the name of a sailboat the family owns (once in the context of giving a secret code to the bad guys, and once in a tacky scene between Madsden and the kids when she's doing a piss-poor job of trying to distract them from the evil guns). Strangely, though the boat comes up several times in very blatant ways, we never actually see a boat and it disappears from the script as the action heats up.

Speaking of action, any time there's a chance of making things more wild or extreme, the scriptwriters took that opportunity to the max. Handguns? That's so typical of home invaders, let's try assault weapons. Why not stick a giant tank of fuel in an abandoned lakeside cottage so we can blow it up later? Could Ford's coworker secretly be working with the bad guys? Let's do it! (And then leave that entire subplot a confused and bloody mess later on with no explanation for what was actually going on.)

All-in-all, I give this film a ranking of six laptops out of ten. It leaves you feeling like you walked in late and missed all the introduction, then compresses three or four films' worth of action and thrills into an hour and a half, and then ends abruptly without tying up so many loose ends that you're wondering if the rest of the movie will come after the credits.