Santa’s Flight Exam

Santa Claus, like all pilots, gets regular visits from the Federal Aviation Administration, and it was shortly before Christmas when the FAA examiner arrived.

In preparation, Santa had the elves wash the sled and bathe all the reindeer. Santa got his logbook out and made sure all his paperwork was in order.

The examiner walked slowly around the sled. He checked the reindeer harnesses, the landing gear, and Rudolf’s nose. He painstakingly reviewed Santa’s weight and balance calculations for the sled’s enormous payload.

Finally, they were ready for the checkride. Santa got in, fastened his seatbelt and shoulder harness, and checked the compass. Then the examiner hopped in carrying, to Santa’s surprise, a shotgun. “What’s that for?” asked Santa incredulously.

The examiner winked and said, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but you’re gonna lose an engine on takeoff.”

(via The Usual Suspects)

My Netflix

I’ve just added a new page to the site (and linked it in the header navigation of every page): my Netflix queues.

Thanks to the plugin goodness of the Netflix Suite, it lists the movies I currently have checked out, the last 90 days (?) of movies I’ve watched and returned along with what I’ve rated them, and my entire Netflix queue (sitting pretty at 441 as of this moment).

Christianity and the ACLU

John Scalzi is looking for Christian lawyers who work for the ACLU:

Someone who is very close to me (who will remain nameless for the moment) just presented the opinion to me that, for various reasons, she strongly suspects there are no lawyers who work for the ACLU who are also Christians, since she was also of the opinion that the ACLU isn’t interested in the constitutional rights of Christians…

Naturally, I was appalled at this statement and told her that I would make it my mission to find her an ACLU lawyer who was also a Christian, and that upon finding such a specimen, that I would ask her to consider the possibility that one could be a Christian and a lawyer and consider as one’s mission the constitutional rights of all Americans.

If you are a lawyer who loves Christ and are either on staff or has worked for the ACLU, would you please come forward to say hello?

The ensuing comment thread on his post is getting very interesting, too. Worth checking out (though it keeps getting longer, so give yourself a few minutes).

(via Boing Boing)

iTunesI Believe” by Absolute U.S., The feat. Palmer, Suzanne from the album This is the Sound of Tribal U.K. Vol. 2 (1995, 9:23).

Quick Review: Quills

Really, really good. Admittedly, they had a couple things going for them to start with — interesting subject matter and a powerhouse cast (Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade, Kate Winslet as Madeline, Michael Caine as Dr. Royer-Collard, and Joaquin Phoenix as the Abbe du Coulmier) — but that’s not always a guaranteed success.

Geoffrey Rush was loads of fun to watch, though, as the Marquis. I commented to Prairie not long after the movie started that while there are a lot of actors who can read and deliver their lines competently, Rush is one who obviously loves language and all the verbal games that can be played with it, and the Marquis’ neverending stream of innuendo (and frequent out-and-out blatant obscenities) was perfect for him.

“Well worth the dig!”

iTunesIgnore the Machine” by Alien Sex Fiend from the album Gothik (1983, 6:42).

Legend

Years ago, my brother and I found a cassette tape on the floor of the family van. Neither of us knew where it came from or who had left it there (as it wasn’t either of ours), but neither of us are generally likely to refuse free music, so into our collection it went.

Upon first glance, it didn’t seem all that special — Bob Marley and the Wailers ‘Legend’ album. When we tossed it in the stereo and started listening to it, though, it turned out that we were in for a bit of a treat. It turned out that rather being the “normal” Legend album, this tape instead had early 80s-era dance remixes of all of the songs. We were confused: it was all the same tracks in the same order as any other Legend tape, but versions we’d never heard before. Since Kevin is more of a reggae fan than I am, and I’m more of a dance music fan than he is, I ended up with the tape.

Over the next few months, every so often I’d try to track down where the tape came from, all to no avail. None of our friends remembered leaving it in the car, or even hearing it in the first place. Since it was an official factory-produced tape, I took it down to Mammoth Music (the single best locally-run music store in Anchorage) and had them punch the catalog number printed on the shell into their system, and they came up blank — no record of that particular version of the album existing at all.

Over time, unfortunately, the tape died, and I eventually resigned myself to its remaining a mystery.

Then, one day a couple years ago, one of the ladies I was working in at the Microsoft print shop came in with a new two-disc deluxe edition of Legend that she’d just picked up. We listened to disc one, she popped in disc two…and I damn near blew a gasket when the long-lost beats of the mysterious remixes came out of the stereo. I don’t have the liner notes available to me now, so I don’t remember all the details, but it turns out that all the remixes had been done between 1980 and 1984, and had been out of print for years before the deluxe edition was released onto CD.

That deluxe edition is now available on iTunes, complete with every one of the remixes I spent so much time enjoying after they appeared in my car. If you think you can handle the admittedly somewhat odd experience of 80’s dance mixes of Bob Marley reggae tunes, I’d definitely recommend giving it a listen — my personal favorite of all the tracks is the remix of Buffalo Soldier.

iTunesBuffalo Soldier (Remix)” by Marley, Bob and the Wailers from the album Legend: Deluxe Edition (1984, 5:25).

Tsunami

My lord — I hadn’t even heard about the disaster around the Indian Ocean until I started browsing through headlines this morning, and now they’re putting the death toll at somewhere over 33,000 people.

Scary stuff.

Christmas Weekend

Good Christmas weekend this year.

Christmas Eve Day I got up at my usual time, dinked around on the ‘puter for a bit while I woke up, packed, and headed down to the train station. Hiked down the hill to 3rd, then caught a bus over to Jackson street and killed time for about an hour before the train left.

I spent most of the train ride in the observation car, listening to the Kleptones and watching the scenery fly by. It was a pretty grey day, but I did what I could to get some interesting shots, trying to catch some of the graffitti on the train cars and bridges we passed.

Prairie and H picked me up at the station, and I got to see Prairie’s new car (something of a Christmas present to herself, as her old Jetta finally became too much of a hassle to keep over this past week), a cute little silver Honda Civic. We swung by Prairie’s mom’s house to drop off bags, and then Prairie and I went over to her dad’s place. I gave her dad some pointers with his new iBook, H and K joined us a little while later, and we had a nice Christmas Eve dinner, complete with decorating Christmas cookies. Eventually, we all headed back to Prairie’s mom’s house to crash out.

Christmas morning rolled around, and Prairie and I joined her mom and sisters downstairs to open presents. My stocking was stuffed with socks and M&M’s, I got a good pile of new clothing (all black, save one shirt that’s black and grey), a few books, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Season One of Buffy (so I can eventually own them all). Lots more than I was expecting to end up with!

That afternoon, Prairie and I went driving around the Woodland area, heading down by the Columbia river, and then a little way up past where the Louis river joins the Columbia and up to a train trestle spanning the Louis. I was a good son and called my parents after we got home — this is the second Christmas I’ve been away from home for, though Prairie and I are discussing seeing if we can head up to Alaska for next Christmas. H’s boyfriend P showed up in time for Christmas dinner, and later on I did my best at playing photographer for the traditional Christmas family photos.

Monday was another day of resting and lazing around. Lunch with P and H over at Prairie’s dad’s house, and then packing up and heading back north to Seattle.

As usual, I’ve got a selection of photos posted to Flickr (61 of the 200-some I took over the course of the weekend). Now I’m back at work, and Prairie’s doing her best to fend off a cold before the New Year’s weekend rolls around. Life returns to normal…for a few days at least.

Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Fröliche Weinachten, Merry Solstice…whatever works in your particular instance, have a good holiday weekend.

I’m off shortly to take the train down to Woodland to spend the weekend with Prairie and her family. I’ll be back sometime Monday evening.

Try not to burn the place down while I’m gone. :)

iTunesFrosty the Snowman” by Cocteau Twins from the album A Very Rare Christmas

Skinheads I Have Known

Back in the mid- to late-’90’s, Anchorage used to have a fairly active skinhead community. I can’t say how they might have compared to similar groups in other cities, but as far as Anchorage went, they were well-known, and fairly “hard core.”

For a long time, I didn’t have a whole lot of contact with them. I’d see them around town every so often, but usually, that was about it.

A few years before, back in high school, a girl I knew was dating one of the leaders of the skinhead scene and I ended up having a couple chances to talk to him, as well as another skinhead a few years later at a party. Those conversations ended up being a lot more interesting than I expected them to be, too, as these guys weren’t your typical skinheads. They’d each gotten into it when they were younger for all the usual reasons that kids are drawn into any sort of gang culture: power, community, a sense of belonging, friends. For people like these guys, the racism aspect of the typical skinhead persona had little to do with why they joined.

In the case of the second guy, who I spent time talking with at a party, he never really developed the racist bent that so many others in the scene did, and instead delved more and more into the roots of the skinhead and nazi movements. Eventually, while he still carried the look and general presence of your typical skinhead, he ended up approaching it not as a reason or excuse to denigrate other races, but simply his way of recognizing the history and background of where he came from. He had pride in his family and his personal history, but he wasn’t racist at all — in fact, his girlfriend was a beautiful asian girl.

I wasn’t entirely sure why he chose to continue to wear the uniform, as there is certainly a very strong (and often not undeserved) stereotype associated with the skinhead look, and for whatever reason, he didn’t run with the SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Predjudice), but that was his choice. In any case, it was a very interesting discussion — while the skinhead stereotype generally tends to include double-digit IQs, some of them are amazingly intelligent. It’s how they choose to apply that intelligence that can make all the difference between whether they’re interesting or frightening (for a good example of the latter, see American History X).

Of course, all too often, people like that are the exception, and I ended up having a couple of memorable run-ins with the Anchorage skinhead crowd.

One night, I and a couple of friends were hanging out at VINL (Village Inn, Northern Lights), our general place to go when we didn’t want to be at home, but didn’t have anything better to do. We had a booth along the outside wall of the smoking section, and had been there for around an hour or so.

About five tables away from us were four of the local skins. We didn’t pay much attention to them at first — either letting sleeping dogs lie or wrapping towels around our head, pick your mental image — but after a while, it was obvious that they were paying attention to us. Glances were shot our direction, and the occasional muttered “faggots” would drift our way.

To this day, I have no idea what caught their attention, or why we became the subjects of their ire. The only even semi-reasonable prospect I’ve ever come up with was that I was wearing a shirt for the band Black Happy — but that explanation seems a little far-fetched even for me to count as probable. Whatever it was, though, when they stood up from their table, rather than leaving, they came over to us. Three of them stood at the end of the table, blocking us in, while the leader of the group sat down next to me.

I don’t have a really clear memory of the next few minutes. The goons were standing mute, while the leader spent a good five minutes spouting off, giving us a good long spiel, about how we should be proud of our race, stand up for our fatherland, and so on. The usual jingoistic propaganda that you tend to hear from either skins or Karl Rove.

We just sat and listened, saying as little as possible. In my head, though, I was going off on the guy — and as I’d just spent the previous summer in Germany, I had a whole spiel ready to go in German. Never opened my mouth, of course, as antagonizing the guy didn’t seem like the brightest approach…but it was brilliant stuff, I tell you.

At one point during his diatribe, one of the other three went out to the parking lot, got their car, and drove it around until it was parked directly in front of the window we were sitting by. He then switched over to the passenger seat and got something out of the glove compartment. I don’t know what it was, but he was being very careful to keep it down and out of sight. Draw your own conclusions.

Eventually, things wound down. The guy stood back up, tossed a few last verbal threats our direction, and then they went out to join their friend in the car. They didn’t leave, though. At first, they just sat in the car, talking and watching us. After a little while, they drove off, only to circle the block and come back to park in the parking lot again. This went on for about another half hour, until they finally left.

More than a little shaken, we stayed put for another hour or so until we were pretty sure that they were actually gone, and then went home.

Later in the year, I talked my way into my first public DJing gig. A new all-ages club, City Lights, had opened up in town, catering primarily to the top-40/hip-hop crowd. I started by just dropping by every so often with a couple friends to check things out, and struck up a conversation with the bartender. After a few visits, she got me in touch with the guys running the place, and I managed to convince them that there was a fairly large untapped market in the local alternative community, and eventually they agreed to give us a chance.

Things went well for a couple months, and then one night about an hour after we opened, who should come in but the four skins that had harassed my friends and I — only this time, they were accompanied by the leader of the local skinhead community. I wasn’t terribly sure what to make of this, but they didn’t look like they were out to cause any trouble, and they just walked to an open table against the back wall of the club and sat down to watch.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, the leader walked up, with the guy who had been the primary antagonist at VINL trailing behind him. “Hey — can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure,” I said, and cued up a slightly longer song.

“Look — the guys told me what went down a while ago. They want to say they’re sorry,” he said, and gestured over his shoulder at the guy behind him, who was studiously avoiding looking at me, preferring to scan the crowd on the dance floor.

“Oh,” I said, more than a little unsure how to proceed from here. “Um…okay.”

“Eehh, don’t worry about it,” he went on. “They were a little drunk, just blowing off some steam — nothing serious.” I just nodded — I wasn’t entirely sure I bought the explanation, but I wasn’t going to start arguing, either. “Look, we were wondering if you could play a few tracks for us,” and he held out a stack of three CDs.

“Um…well, yeah, sure,” I said, and took the CDs. “Why not?”

They went back to their table, and a few songs later, I tossed in the songs they had marked. All three songs were really high-energy, aggro skinhead punk. The skins moved onto the dancefloor (which cleared out rather quickly), and spent the next few minutes lightly pounding each other in a quick high-speed mini-mosh. The songs ended, and as I put something else on, four of them went back to their table while the leader came back up to the DJ booth to get the CDs.

“Thanks a lot, man,” he said as I handed him the CDs. “No hard feelings, right?”

“Sure, no hard feelings,” and I shook his hand.

“Good. Look, you ever run into any trouble, or need a hand or something — get ahold of us. You’re a good guy.”

“I appreciate that.”

And back he went to the table.

I never had to take him up on his offer, but from then on, anytime I ran into him around town, we’d say hi and chat for a few minutes. He and his boys occasionally showed up at the club, but never had me play anything for them again. They’d just walk in, grab a table, hang out and chat with each other for a while, then leave, never causing any problems. And for a year or two, if I’d needed it, I could have had the skins at my back.

It’s a weird little world I live in sometimes.