Wet Dog

A couple weeks ago it was a typical rainy December day in Cupertino, and I was sitting in my office getting work done. Suddenly I noticed the smell of wet dog, coming out of nowhere. I thought it odd since Apple doesn’t allow dogs on campus, but I mostly ignored it. I just set my iChat status to, “It smells like wet dog in here,” and forgot about it.

An hour or so later a friend and coworker of mine (who happens to be black, which is a pertinent fact in this entry) pinged me telling me that my status message was the funniest of mine that he’d ever seen. I didn’t think it was quite all that funny, and I asked him to explain. He paused, and then proceeded to send me a link to a series of blog entries which contain the answer I was searching for. You’ll have to search for the phrase “wet dog” on that page to find it, but the gist is this: unwashed white people, when wet, smell like wet dog. This is something that is apparently only noticed by non-white people.

At first I didn’t believe him, even with the blog post. But now Steph has independently confirmed noticing the smell during rainy days with no dogs around, wondering what it was. I’ve even found entire books on the subject. So I guess it’s true.

More than anything else, though, I’d like any non-white readers to confirm they’ve noticed this. Even better… how long has this belief been around? It seems like it’s everywhere now that I’ve opened my eyes to it. Has this always been around, or is it something that has only been noticed more recently? I can’t imagine it’s new, but it’s new to me.

I Wuv My Wii

I’m going to resist the urge to write a ten-page detailed review of the thing since those are available elsewhere. Just google “wii review” and you’re likely to get something more professional. I already wrote about the Wii controller back when the Wii was still called “Revolution.” Now that I’ve had a chance to play with it for over a month, I want to say a few more things. I apologize if this seems a little thrown together. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking this through or scaffolding a logical series of statements because I’ve been having too much fun playing with the Wii.

I think the Wii is the most compelling video game system I’ve ever laid hands on. It’s easily the best gaming system I’ve ever owned. There are many reasons I say that, but the primary one is simple: everyone wants to play. Playing is much, much more fun when it’s with the people you love. I’ve already had three little parties at my house that mostly centered on the Wii, and everyone loved it. I’ve heard countless stories of people’s non-gaming parents and grandparents picking up the controller and using it successfully on the first attempt. These are people who usually find it difficult to even use a computer mouse, let alone a game controller.

The gameplay, as exemplified in the included Wii Sports game, is so completely intuitive that no one really has to tell you how to do it. When you’re playing Tennis, for instance, you just swing your arm as though you’re holding a real tennis racket. There are absolutely no buttons the player has to push. Your character’s feet move automatically, so there’s nothing left to do but think about your forehand and backhand, timing them properly. It’s also realistic: if you swing your arm harder or more softly, the ball will react appropriately. If you put spin or angle on the ball in a realistic way, it’ll happen on screen.

And that’s just Tennis. We haven’t even talked about Golf, Bowling, Baseball or Boxing yet. All of them are smash hits at my house. Last week a very fit friend of mine was panting and sweating like crazy after defeating eight or so opponents in boxing matches. This system is about something much more interactive and fun than pushing buttons. Something that will reach a lot more people.

Aside from the Wii games (and I must point out that I’m skipping a lot of things that could be said there), the system itself is a ton of fun. Creating Miis, (which are little caricatures of yourself, your friends, your family, favorite celebrities, etc) is a blast. I created my Mii, one for Steph, and a few others before I even began playing any of the games I bought for the system. The best part of all is that in Wii Sports, you can play using your Mii! So you essentially play as yourself, seeing a little cartoon of yourself on screen as you swing your racket around. Your friends and their Miis are oftentimes in the stands cheering you on, walking by in the bowling alley, or playing center field in baseball. The fact that the Wii has built-in wifi makes it easy to get it online and share Miis and send messages to my Wii-owning friends, too.

As if all that wasn’t enough, you’ve got the Virtual Console to top it off. Nintendo is re-publishing some of its best games from its previous systems (NES, SNES and N64) and the games of other, previously-competing consoles like the Sega Genesis, and TurboGrafx 16. And they’re offering these games in a sort of iTunes-like a la carte system. What this means is that I can download the original Super Mario Brothers from 1985 and play the game in all its glory on my Wii, on my widescreen TV, for $5. Worth it? Yes. Oh, yes. My goodness, yes. The original Zelda from 1987 is on there. Sonic the Hedgehog from 1991 is on there. They add more titles every single Monday.

So in short, I’m incredibly impressed with the system, and I hope that even people who haven’t previously enjoyed gaming will seriously consider picking one up. I mean, I need more people to send my Miis to!

Making Music with Eddie

If you thought this post-Christmas blogging explosion only covered the last month, have I got news for you! We’re going all the way back to August, baby! Eddie visited me in late August and we had a good time hanging out in Santa Cruz, trying to clean my office windows with a squirt gun and some Scrubbing Bubbles shower cleaner in the middle of the night, talking about how we handle risk, and talking about girls. Well, women. I guess some things have changed since high school.

Still, no visit with Eddie is complete without, you guessed it, rocking out. We used to perform together a lot, and Eddie has become quite good with a guitar over the last few years, so when we fired up Garage Band and put the guitar in Eddie’s hands, interesting things started to happen, and I recorded them.

Amongst the best were two covers of “Such Great Heights” that we ended up doing. At first, we were just trying to rip off Iron & Wine’s version of the song, but we eventually broke free and went punk. Later, Eddie urged me to post the stuff up here, and I refused because I didn’t like my singing. My breathing and phrasing is all wrong. It doesn’t go anywhere. The notes aren’t even all that accurate. All in all, they were some of the worst recordings of my singing that have ever been made. (Make no mistake, Eddie’s work is quite good here, and that’s the main reason I’m putting it up.) Eventually I decided to not listen to good judgement, get over it, and just put it up here in the hopes that people would enjoy these songs for the three-take wonders they are. Simple, faux-pretentious, and silly. Plus, there’s crackers!

Enjoy. Maybe.

Our Iron & Wine lullaby ripoff:
[REDACTED]

Our punk version:
[REDACTED]

Oh, and you don’t have to listen to them in your browser. You can download the MP3s here if you’d like to bring them with you or save them.

(Update 4/27/12: I decided that I am just too annoyed and embarrassed by these songs to keep them up here, so I removed the links. Call me a coward if you want, but I insist that I can do better, and I don’t need to publish my bottom-of-the-barrel scrapings in order to get there. I like Eddie’s work, but not mine.)

Falling Into an Imogen Heap

Sometime in 2005 I bought a song by Imogen Heap called “Hide and Seek.” I listened to it a couple times and forgot about it. For some unknown reason, it didn’t catch me. I actually forgot about it so completely that I didn’t realize I owned it when I tried to purchase it again this summer, when I fell in love with the song. I thought iTunes was making a mistake when it warned me that I already owned it, and I ignored the warning and spent another buck on the song.

It was a buck well spent, though. The song is as harmonically lush as a thick green garden, filled by Imogen’s vocals and vocoder. Every time I listen to it I’m moved by the shimmer, the passion, the sparse landscape of it, like some kind of angel. I’ve been nearly moved to tears by it on at least one occasion, and I can’t say that about very many songs. Especially not songs for which the lyrics mean almost nothing to me, and I admit I have no clue what this song is “about.” The complex, surprising chords, the swooping flange, the masterful pacing and super-wide dynamic range, those are the lyrics. They push me around.

After listening to this song over and over, I noticed one striking thing about it: the levels of passion in this song are truly off the charts, but they’re not unique in the kind of emotions they bring out. I was able to think of one other song that evoked that same kind of reckless abandon in its passion: “Let Go” by Frou Frou (probably recognized by most from the Garden State Soundtrack).

Some of you music lovers out there are saying “Aha!” right now, but it took me awhile. I finally noticed that the voices in both songs were similar and looked it up, and it turns out the two songs are written by and sung by the same person, Imogen Heap. So I guess this entire entry, oversimplified, is just my way of saying that I absolutely love Heap’s passion and abandon in her music, and I intend to be a fan of that aspect of her music for a long, long time. The strange part is that I don’t own the rest of her work. Just those two songs. I guess I’m a little afraid to confirm that she could never create more than two songs like these, and part of me would almost rather not know if those two songs are really the limit of what I’ll enjoy in her work.

Still, I’ve gotta give in sometime. Something tells me I’ll know the answer soon enough.

sElf

This entry may be the worst-timed of the bunch tonight. But it’s funny, so get over it.

About three weeks ago my bud Eddie sent me an link to a website wherein you can create an elf… of yourself! Appropriately enough, the url is elfyourself.com. Who would pass up such an obvious mnemonic rhyme? Not me!

Plus, I apparently love making myself look stupid, so I made a self elf. Enjoy, even though it’s well after Christmas. Maybe it still somehow “counts” before New Years. Christmas is one of those multi-day holidays, you know? There’s some post-Christmas cultural refraction going on here.

But I didn’t stop there! Oh no! For better or worse, I made an elf of someone you’re all familiar with. I think you’ll like him much better than the original. What a cheery fella.

Christmas in California

I’ve lived all over the Midwest. I was born in Iowa, just 60 miles from the teensy town of Big Springs, South Dakota, where I grew up. Then I lived in Willmar, MN for awhile, Green Bay, WI, and finally the Twin Cities. If you plotted this on a map, you’d see that the Twin Cities was my family’s Sol, and we were a planet with a fractured orbital path, careening throughout the Midwest. Still, no matter where in the Midwest we lived, every Christmas we would head into the Twin Cities to spend time with all our relatives.

This year was the first year in my and Stephanie’s entire lives that we did not set foot in Minnesota. OK, we did videochat with a select group of Minnesotans, but we didn’t inhale.

It was a bit strange not being in Minnesota on Christmas, and certainly strange not being with family other than Steph. It’s been a year since we’ve been back, and we certainly miss them. And we miss all the rest of you too! Still, our Christmas was fun, the weather was far better than what we’ve come to expect of Christmas Day, and we really needed the break from our busy schedules. The lack of airports was a bigger plus than I ever expected.

So if you were wondering why you didn’t see us this Christmas, now you know! And knowing is something the something.

Getting a Wii

On the evening of November 18th, I called a friend of mine at about 6pm. It turned out he had just joined a growing line of folks outside a local Target. These people, including my friend, were lining up to buy the Nintendo Wii, which would first go on sale on November 19th. It was already suspected that demand would far outweigh supply, so people were lining up to make sure they got one. I wanted to be in line with them right then, but a previous, unbreakable commitment kept me from the line.

I told my friend of my predicament, and told him I’d probably join him by 11pm. He warned me that if I couldn’t get there earlier, it was possible I wouldn’t get one at all. Knowing that stores were likely to be out of stock of Wiis for weeks (and having strong competition for them until at least Christmas) I despaired. And then he did something wonderful, something sneaky, something I’m a bit ashamed of, something for which I will be forever indebted: he offered me a cheat code. An unofficial list of Wii-buyers had been started by a curly-haired guy near the front of the line, and roll call was being done by him at midnight to make sure folks who had lined up were still there and in the right order. I admit it: I accepted the offer, and my friend snuck my name on the list at position #73.

It worked flawlessly. I arrived at 10:30pm (with Starbucks for him and another linemate, of course) and had a seat on the cold, hard cement with over 120 other people. When roll call came at midnight, I learned that since we had a list of people in line, and knew their general order, it wasn’t extremely important to anyone around me that I stay in line the entire time. The line was static at this point, since we knew how many Wiis this Target had, and knew that no one who wasn’t in line would get one. So I went home, slept a few hours, and got back in line with my sleeping bag at about 5:15am, anticipating a 6am roll call.

At 6am, we were all asked to put our sleeping bags, seats, tents, extension cords, TVs (really!) and other extraneous equipment away (in our cars, mostly) and wait in a clearer, more orderly line. 7am came and our tickets to Wiidom were handed out; tickets that secured each holder one Wii when the store opened. I was so glad to have mine I took a picture of it, much like a valiant hunter might photograph himself kneeling beside his prize buck, slain in the grass. This was victory. An hour or two later, and a few hundred dollars lighter, I headed home with my Wii, three additional games, and some extra controllers. Christmas had come early for me this year.

Having done all that, I can say with certainty that I’m going to try much harder to pre-order next time, since spending that much time on the sidewalk wasn’t much fun, even if it was a reduced amount of time compared to other line members, or the weather was better than other places in the USA. Midnight sales are my 2nd choice.

Still, I’d do it all over again for the Wii. I’ll give you my brief impressions in another entry.