Saw a commercial for what looks like a godawful one-joke movie while watching poor Petey get hammered. But the image of the old-man baby taps deeply into my subconscious. When I was a kid, I was constantly having dreams that my mother was pregnant (which was probably not a stretch, as I’m the oldest of 5, all born within ten years) but the baby would be born, and it would be a gnome-like old man. The weirdest variant of that was the one where she gave birth, and the baby was already five years old, and it was
Webster.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you may have noticed that I’m a devotee of Davis Square’s Someday Cafe. I heard some people talking about it closing this morning, and apparently, unless something happens, it probably will. More to come, no doubt; especially if I find that there is something to be done.

So, my G4 PowerBook that I got last August had a bit of a flakey display; starting in October or so, every so often, the LCD display would start to grey over. I took it in to the Genius Bar at the Cambridgeside Galleria and the guy thought it was probably a hardware issue, and that it would have to get shipped to the real support place, and so I should probably back up my hard drive. Thing was, when I got it home, it worked fine for 5 months. Couldn’t make the greying thing happen if I wanted to. Then, when we got back from our little Montreal excursion at the beginning of May, it pretty much stopped working altogether, and I could rarely get it to not do the greying thing. But I just didn’t have my act together to do the backup and send it in.

I should have, though. They turned it around in 3 days; I dropped it off at the Apple Store on Sunday at about 4:45pm, and DHL tried to deliver it at 9:08 am on Wednesday. Not bad!

According to the receipt, they replaced the ASSY, INVERTER, PIEZO, TOKIN, PB15″; and they also did some REPAIR: TIGHTEN/LUBRICATE HINGES.

I went from being not so happy that my fancy expensive computer was not working, to impressed at the speedy repair. Let’s see how it holds up.

So, I don’t really believe in donating to political campaigns, because that money just goes into making manipulative commercials that line the pockets of old media companies. So, what I’m doing instead is trying to cost my candidates’ opponents money by searching for their names or the office on Google and Yahoo! and clicking on their ads.

In reality, it’s just the lesser of two evils; this money just goes to new media companies, to aid in their efforts to help the Chinese government oppress its people. But at least there aren’t manipulative commercials as a byproduct.

If anybody has any better creative anti-donation strategies, I’m all ears.

I forgot to mention that my cousin Margaret called me from the free Andrew Bird show at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago, just to taunt me. I caught a couple of bars of “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left” before the signal cut out. Or she hung up, I couldn’t tell which.
I love her, but it was mean, especially because we’re not going to end up seeing him in Montreal over the 4th of July weekend.

Creative juices are flowing at the Curtisian. Terri is warming up by painting watercolors. I’m blogging up more than I have in months. I letterpressed some experiments in silver ink. I’m looking forward to a four day weekend where I don’t touch a computer and maybe drink a case of PBR.

A thank you, six months belated, to Miss Trix and Mr. Villain for their ‘welcome to 2006′ mix 2-CD box set. If only for introducing me to The Mountain Goats. I unofficially made “This Year” my theme song for the year early on (”I am gonna make it through this year, if it kills me!”), and now that I finally got around to buying the disc, I can’t get “You or Your Memory” out of my head.

(PS: I bought it via eMusic, so “disc” should be in “air quotes”. If you are thinking about signing up for eMusic, let me know, so that you can give me the kickback 50 mp3s. Shameless, I know. But how many kickback BMG Music Club CDs did you get out of me over the years, Stephen???)

Also in music news, is Jeff Mangum back?

No, the world doesn’t need Harry Potter to survive book 7. I’m hoping he doesn’t. Happy endings are a dime a dozen. Escapist fantasy and action movies and romanic comedies are everywhere, and like all junk food, leave you feeling hungrier than when you started.

I have always hypothesized that the reason that these books are wildly popular is that the heroes suffer in ingenious and extremely satisfying ways.

Case in point. Terri and I just watched the movie version of Book 4 the other night, and while I think they did an impressive job of condensing an 18,000-odd page book into a pretty good movie, the one scene they botched was the Yule Ball. And it only seemed botched because it’s so perfect in the book: it’s as good a depiction of a junior high dance as I’ve seen in anything, ever. It brilliantly captures the volatile mix of innocence, hormones, and hideously inflated romantic expectations. It captures the terror of actually asking someone to go with you. Nobody ends up going with who they should be going with. Everyone is miserable the whole way through, and it ends in tears, with nobody speaking to each other. And it has that “Oh, my god, my life is over!” feeling.

It’s awful, it resonates, it’s true. Compare and contrast with, say, Sixteen Candles, where after medium-intensity pouting for two hours, Molly Ringwald is swept off her feet by her Ferrari driving bo-hunk. Escapism just doesn’t give you the entertainment bang for the buck that misery does. Admit it!

I’m actually excited about a summer movie: Richard Linklater’s adaptation of A Scanner Darkly.

You know, I don’t want to irk two of the handful of people who read this thing, but I just can’t cheer on the Fenway crowd for booing the Phillies’ Brett Myers last Saturday. And it’s not just because I have to disagree with Dan Shaughnessy on everything.

Booing a formerly-beloved center fielder, giving a standing ovation to a well-beloved part-time outfielder, these are things that are within the confines of the game. When the crowd acts like a jury of 35,000, making a decision with scant (though emotionally charged) evidence, on what will probably be a real criminal case, it feels wrong; it’s the kind of mass impulse that leads to the kind of awful things mobs can do. Even though the guy really does sound like a shit, even though what he is reported to have done is awful, and even though the only remorse he still seems to have shown is of the “I’m sorry you found out about it” variety.

I can’t get on the fans too hard. If I’d have been at Fenway, I probably would have joined in. But I can’t take the extra step and say it’s good or that I’m happy about it.

Really, if there’s anyone at fault here (besides Myers himself), it’s the Phillies management for starting him the next day. I mean, even if he had done something trivial, say got arrested for shoplifting some executive toys from Nieman Marcus, I don’t think it’s out of line for them to pull the guy out of the lineup the next day.

On a similar note, there was a good interview with Jaron Lanier in the Globe’s Ideas section last Sunday on the load of crap that is the whole “Wisdom of Crowds” idea. He draws what I think is a valid parallel between the mute acceptance of badly designed software and group think: the idea that “the computer must know better than I do” being a similar individual abdication of responsibility.

This is why I love the man.

Picture my disappointment as I realized that, for all the pizzazz of “Superman Returns,” its global weapon of choice would not be terrorism, or nuclear piracy, or dirty bombs. It would be real estate. What does Warner Bros. have in mind for the next installment? Superman overhauls corporate pension plans? Luthor screws Medicare?

and even better:

“Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and superman—a rope over an abyss.” That is Nietzsche, coiner of the Übermensch, and in “Thus Spake Zarathustra” he scorns what he calls “extraterrestrial hopes” in favor of those, rooted on earth, who struggle to overcome the weakness of their own humanity. That is a proper, if perilous, subject for grownup cinema, and I for one have grown tired of supermen, and superwomen, who start with such a flagrant advantage over the rest of us. Mind you, if Superman is such a paragon, how come he wants to save a species so universally dumb that not a single member of it recognizes him when he puts on a pair of glasses?

have the same sense of fatalistic slow motion at their beginning as this one does?

My report on the Third Annual Print Arts Fair at the Museum of Printing in North Andover is up on my letterpress blog.

When we were in PA for Abby’s graduation a month ago (I’m so behind on the blogging) I saw a sad item in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that Rolling Rock was bought by Anheiser Busch. (unfortunately, I have to link to the evil Tribune-Review, because the Post-Gazette story has gone behind a paywall).

Production in the brewery in Latrobe, PA ends this month; from now on, Rolling Rock will be brewed in New Jersey.

Fortunately, InBev, the Belgian company that currently owns Rolling Rock, may have found a buyer for the Latrobe brewery itself.

Still, it’s the end of an era. Rolling Rock was probably the best known (and most palatable) of all autochthonous Western Pennsylvanian beers. Not that there are many left at all. Last fall, the Pittsburgh Brewing Company, makers of Iron City and IC Light went bankrupt (admittedly, this is not much of a loss; there’s a reason the stuff is not sold outside Pittsburgh).

I have found no word on whether or not Anheiser Busch will continue the poetic, painted-on labels with the enigmatic “33″ on them.

We made our first trip to Fenway Park this year to see the Sox take down the Nationals on Monday night, with Terri’s parents. Some random notes:

• Another reason to like Mike Lowell: his at-bat song is “London Calling”
• We got a chuckle when the Fenway sound crew played the “Three’s Company” theme song when two Nationals went out to the pitcher’s mound for a conference.
• Happy to see Gabe Kapler back at Fenway for the first time since his utterly bizarre Achilles tendon rupture last year. He got a standing O; in anyplace other than Fenway, a standing O for a part-time outfielder would seem weird.
• So, I can’t figure out if the Fenway sound people played “A Town Called Malice” by The Jam when lackluster reliever Rudy Seanez came out of the pen because Rudy picked it, or because the sound guys were making a comment on the fact that he was getting booed mercilessly. If it’s the latter, might I suggest “A Message to You, Rudy” for next time?
• Terri and I resumed our standing discussion of what our closer songs would be. I still stick by “Stigmata” by Ministry. Terri, in a similar vein, but far more ingeniously, sticks with, “Control I’m Here” by Nitzer Ebb, which I should let her explain, because I don’t want to steal her thunder more than I just did. I wish I had thought of it.
• And here’s an mp3 of the fans singing along to Sweet Caroline. A few seconds in you can hear an announcement that the Nationals put in former Sox and Damon-noggin-clocker Damien Jackson.