Holy Photoshop!!! III

2006...and today. Do they honestly think that looks like Brian Wilson? God only knows.

Miss Bong

In Korean, this says "Miss Bong". Phonetically it sounds like "Mee-su Bong."

They're little fishcakes somewhat like slim jims.

Along those lines, there is a sports drink called Pis in Korea and also Pocari Sweat (competing sports drink).

Dinner Me Dreadfully

According to an article in our local paper, the following stores located in suburban Albany closed in the past year: Dinner Me Quickly, Make & Take, Dream Dinner, Dinner by Design, and Super Suppers. All specialize in foods to be taken home and frozen for later consumption.

I never heard of a single one of them!

Snapshot: The Election

Spotted in a Los Angeles office complex:

Disneyland

Isa and I were invited by friends to Disneyland this week. We'd never been, so we accepted the offer. We parked, and waited in line for a tram. Then we waited in another line for a security check. Then we waited for tickets. The inside of the park:



We walked down the fabled Main Street, and rounded the corner to see Indiana Jones beating the crap out of a turbaned man, in the form of a show. After he threw the man over some barrels, Indy whispered conspiratorially to the crowd through his wireless mic, "When he wakes up, tell him I won."

We then stood in line for almost an hour to ride the Haunted Mansion.

After that, we were educated on the use of the FastPass system; where I put our tickets in a machine for the popular rides, and another ticket is spit out, telling us what times we can return to go in a faster line for the ride. We did this for Space Mountain, and were told to return at 3:00 (it was about noon). I tried another fast pass, but it wouldn't let me, saying we hadn't used the other ones yet.

I then waited twenty minutes to use the bathroom.

We ended up in line for about forty minutes for pizza. I witnessed, firsthand, the primordial soup of the degradation of line etiquette in America. People cut , stole others' orders, grabbed, and ran for tellers. People waited in line at the cash register as others brought them plate after plate of food. Mothers took this moment as a time to teach their children how to pay for food and get change. People pushed, shoved, yelled at each other, saved tables with purses, plastic bags and cups. Babies hollered and kids whined. Parents blocked entire sections with their strollers. Other wars ensued with the scooter people.

After lunch, our friends rode the kiddie rocket and we waited in line for the "Honey I Shrunk the Audience!" By this time, it was Space Mountain time. So, in five hours we'd ridden a total of two rides.

As the day grew on, the crowds grew even thicker, the lines even longer. We waited an hour for the Pirates of the Carribbean. The ride itself was minutes long. We then got another fast pass for the log flume ride (which name escapes me) for 11:00 pm. I needn't go on, it's clear how the day went. I wouldn't recommend it.

Holy Photoshop!!! II

Bob Costas, circa Athens

Bob Costas, circa
Beijing

(I'll leave the punchline hanging like a nice Chinese Olympic curveball)

Holy Photoshop!!!

Three photos. Same Carrie Underwood. Doesn't she look like someone completely different on the left/cover photo?

The Hypotenuse?

I use a G5 (Mac). I'm amazed by its stability but my background was web programming so I maintain (for sport) other boxes on my little home network; I have linux and windows machines as well. John gave Isa an IBook for school this year (his old one). It's a decent thing, but it clearly needs a new battery. I went on apple.com to buy a battery and two sizes of IBook came up in the battery department: 12" and 14" screens.
I did what I thought was logical, I measured the screen:



Which you can see, is 11 inches and change. Is this the 12" screen then? So I measure the entire back of the unit:



Which is clearly a little more than 12". So what is this screen? 12" right? Well, it turns out that's wrong! This is the 14 inch model. I know this because I ordered the 12 inch battery and it was too small and opened up the battery to see what was going on. As a non mac user, I didn't know you could actually see this on the battery itself (14 inch battery) because no PC will tell you anything about itself- particularly it's screen size from the battery. Not logical.

I complained to John, and he suggested perhaps Macs are doing the hypotenuse,



and he was right. I guess I don't think like a mac user. This just seemed intuitive to John how you'd measure a screen.

Dead Bees, More Flies... Why?

Okay, so by now I'm sure you're all aware -through various stories in the media- that honey bees are apparently dying mysteriously all across the country. Well, not knowing a damn thing about bees, I sort of assumed it was mainly the kinds of bees that are employed by beekeepers. You know, that breed of bees. That "sect" or "flock" or "gaggle" as it were that put on their hard hats and go to work making honey from 9-5 then retire to their combs at night. Now, however, I think I'm witnessing firsthand that the hard working bees of the honey industry and the lazy bastard bees that just chill out around my yard and suck off my flowers may be suffering the same inexplicable demise.

This past year, we have seen an inordinate amount of dead bees just lying around on the ground everywhere. Literally, Amanda fears for my life when I take out the trash in my socks or bare feet, worried that l may step on one of these deceased guys and get the last gift they can give, even after they're departed... a rousing stinger to the toe. At any rate, are we in fact witnessing "the end of days" as Amanda keeps telling me? Is anyone else seeing this phenomenon in their neck of the woods? I honestly can't recall every seeing this many dead bees just... dead. It's weird. Today, for instance, I went out to clean out the lint trap for our dryer vent and found five of them lying in proximity, prone on their backs, in what looked like a weird bee suicide pact. It's creepy, and I want someone to just tell me that it's normal and that it's always been this way and that M. Knight Shamalamalamalan stuff isn't "happening." It's just that I've never noticed it before, right? Because like when you buy a certain type of car, you suddenly start thinking there a ton of those cars around, right? That theory is the one I want to believe, but I can't because I just bought a Prius, and there really ARE a ton of them that have popped onto the streets in the last six months due to the gas price hike.

Now, the other insect phenomenon that's going on this summer is flies. Flies. Everywhere FLIES! I told Amanda that this summer is out of control with the fly population compared to summers past, but she refused to heed my warning. Then, the other day, I was at a friend's house when the topic arose without my prompting, and everyone practically screamed in unison, "Yes! The FLIES!!!?!!! What the fuck is going on with the flies this summer???" And you can't just limit it to the house. Oh no. The library.. check. The WGA lounge... check. Any and every restaurant in a 20 mile radius (which just covers the general area we migrate around in)... check.

So, what's going on people? Are we about to see a Hitchcockian nightmare play out in front of our very eyes? Are bees dying while flies are multiplying? Where do the ants stand in all of this? We actually had great success ridding our house of them through an organic pest control company.

Help me... please heeeeeelp me....

Process Diagram

This appears on my screen whenever I am prompted to change my password at work.

The Nightstand Drawer

Last week we loaded up the mini van with 2 kids, the dog, mom, dad and plenty of dvds and off we went to Northern Michigan for our vacation. We have never been there before. A lot of midwesterners recommended Michigan so we rented a house in a little town nestled between two lakes. In the past few years we have rented our vacation houses through http://www.vrbo.com/ -and it has been perfect for us. This house definitely did not disappoint -- Walking distance to the lakes, the town, "nicely appointed and tastefully decorated." In most of the houses that we rent, the owner's stuff is locked up in a closet. My friend Bill says that's where they stash the good television.
This cottage, however, didn't seem to have an owner's closet. They pretty much left their stuff in the drawers and closets. Which is fine, it is their house, afterall. I actually kind of like it when people leave their personal touches around. It feels more "homey" and I like to guess what the owners are like since we never do more than email with them.
In this case, we will call the owners Jackie and Pat. The first night gave us a little more insight into Jackie and Pat's lives than we wanted. As I went to look for the remote control in the nightstand, guess what I found?
Not a Bible.
Phone Book? Nope.
Gun? I wish...
Next to the framed photos of their sweet little kids, along with a book and some other stuff, was a great big purple penis... that looked like it had an on/off switch.
I went downstairs after finding it and said to my husband, "Good thing the kids didn't look in our nightstand drawer - there's a big dildo in it that Jackie must have left behind" Mike said, "Nice. How do we know it is not Pat's?"
Not that I care, but I have been wondering for a week. How did you not pack that when you were putting the kid's pictures away? Is this some kind of psychological test? WTF?
I am also totally grossed out. My kids open drawers and empty them out all of the time. I sure as hell don't want them touching that or worse yet, my teething 14 month old putting it in his mouth!
Jackie and Pat were the last ones to stay there before us too. So it is most likely theirs. Part of me wanted to jokingly say something. The other part wants to make sure I get the $500 security deposit back first.


Note - although I DO have a photo of the purple penis in my phone, I used the cottage photo instead for this posting to keep things classy around here.

Brush with Celebrity

Brushes with celebrities are a recurring theme at Salt in Wound. I haven't had much to add to these posts. For one thing, there are few celebrities in Albany. For another, much of my knowledge about celebrities (Lee Israel? Bernie Brillstein?) actually comes from Salt in Wound

So imagine my excitement when I found out that Keenan had just finished spending two weeks in a yurt with none other than the son (or possibly grandson) of esteemed Channel 13 weatherman, Bob Kovachick!

Goodbye, Bernie Brillstein

It was reported today that Hollywood heavyweight Bernie Brillstein passed away recently, of causes that I did not retain. I'm not sure of his exact age, but I do know he was pretty old.

Bernie, I didn't know you, but I did know of you, sort of. When I saw the headline today saying you had died, I recognized your name. And it crossed my mind that perhaps I'd seen some of the movies, or maybe television shows, that you had directed, or had worked on, or were otherwise involved with. Or if you were involved with both movies and television, maybe I saw or read reviews of both your TV shows and movies.

If you did manage to work in both TV and movies, well, that's great, and I hope you were proud! Lots of people don't even get to work in one of those mediums, much less both. So if that's the case, congratulations! And if not, well, maybe you turned one down to fully focus on the other and were totally happy with that decision. In either event, I hope whatever you did or didn't do, that it was the right choice for you and that you were happy with it. And that if you weren't happy with it, that you at least learned from it and that the trials and tribulations you may or may not have gone through made you stronger, if there were trials and tribulations.

You must have been an excellent producer, or terrific agent/cameraman, or even a superb accountant, for someone not in the industry such as myself to have recognized your name so quickly. My first thought was that perhaps someone on Salt on Wound would post their memories of you. Since this hasn't happened, it's been left to me, and I'm doing the best I can with that right now. It's not all that easy, frankly, in a similar way as your life, which wasn't at all easy either, perhaps. But I do hope that wherever you are, you're looking down at this and are smiling and aren't even the least bit insulted.

Now I'm thinking of Gilligan's Island for some reason and am wondering if perhaps you were involved with that show in some way (sound engineer?). Honestly, Gilligan's Island was pretty much the first specific show that came to mind when I read the news about you this morning. And suddenly much has become clear to me : Sherwood Schwartz worked on Gilligan's Island, and you both have alliterative names, and I though of Salt in Wound when I heard your name because Sherwood Schwartz has been written up here. But maybe it's more than that. Who can say? It's a mystery. So's life and death, by the way. So's life and death. (Mysteries).

It's odd, but I do believe that from this point forward I will think of you whenever Gilligan's Island is brought up, and I do hope that you were involved on that show in some way, or at least that you were a fan, or at minimum you liked it OK so that it's not insulting to your memory to associate you with Gilligan's Island. I did like that show a lot as a child. I don't know what I'd think of it now. But if I saw it now and didn't like it, but you were involved with the show, you could have given me pointers on why it was funny! Too late for that now, though. And if you didn't care for the show at all, let's just assume that if I saw it now I'd hate it too, and no harm no foul, OK?

Goodbye, Bernie Brillstein. You were beloved by many people, or at least by a few people. Well, I sure hope you were, anyway. It sure would suck for you if you weren't. Wow. I don't want to even think about that. So let's assume you were madly, truly, loved. Much better! At minimum, I'll be thinking fondly of you.

Home Energy Audit

Okay, first off, I'm not even sure I have the right to be posting here since I've been decidedly absent for what seems like years, but is probably only a few months. I'm sorry, okay? I'm just so extremely busy with so many very, very important things. Waking up, eating, looking at the baby, eating some more, sleeping. It's all very time consuming you see, so don't give me any guff! Yep, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Now, to the matter at hand: home energy audits. I had a professional expert in home energy efficiency come out yesterday and run a battery of tests on our home to find out just how lacking in efficiency it was. Man, was it fascinating! And man, is our house inefficient! Not anymore than an average California home, actually, but that's not saying much. It turns out that we are losing 44% of the air that is pumping out of our air conditioning system due to leaks, messy duct work, and a few other factors. That obviously leads to a unit that is working way too hard and way too long to get our house temperature down to a reasonable comfort level. The other thing I learned is that the key to getting a house really efficient is creating an almost balloon-like or cave-like shell or "envelope" to create a zero pressure difference between outside and inside. This is the ideal. This is the goal.

The most amazing test came when the guy took out an infrared camera device with an LCD screen (see pic above). It was straight out of Star Trek, and the imagery was straight out of Predator. The pic above is one I took of the device capturing its x-ray like video of our ceiling. Note the dark skeletal "bones" which are actually the joists in the attic forming our ceiling structure. Really cool and kind of eery I thought. He pointed this device at all our walls and ceiling to get the thermal values that they were retaining and to view if there was insulation inside. There was, in fact, zero insulation (it was built in the 20's when we were all even bigger idiots or perhaps just not as pussy-ish as we are now) between the studs, and therefore the gaps were holding and storing the sun's heat like a convection oven. You can see the brightness of these gaps in the picture, meaning that area is a hotpsot. The temperature of the east facing wall was 95º!! The ceiling? Wait for it... wait for it.... 105º in its hottest spot!!! So no wonder the compressor on our air conditioner worked so hard that it shut down as our coils became embedded inside a big ice block that formed around them last year. The following link provides a glossary of terms relating to this whole efficient home world.

Hi, I'm a link!


The next step for us is to determine which things we want to do -and are willing to pay for- to get us as close to being a zero energy house as possible. Here's the definition as it can be found on the above link...

Zero Energy House - This is any house that averages out to net zero energy consumption. A zero energy home can supply more energy than it needs during peak demand, typically using one or more solar energy strategies, energy storage and/or net metering. In a zero energy home, a tight building envelope and efficient HVAC systems, appliances and lighting all significantly contribute to less demand for energy.

If any of you out here are interested in having this audit done, I can get you the information. It wasn't cheap, but I thought it was well worth it when you consider the egregious energy prices that will be coming our way. California just passed a bill allowing utility companies to go as high as .99 per kilowatt hour. This is over a three fold rate increase over our last DWP bill. Insane.


* I even had him point the thermal reader at me just to check if I'm 98.7º. I was a little cooler. Temperature wise, that is. Just temperature wise.

Cone up to Code

Kids in Vegas

There's grills in this skill crane.



This skill crane is extra large, big enough for a basketball (or a toddler).


Isa rode this thing five times.

Lee Israel Is Real

How heartening it has been over the past week and a half to see the phoenix-like return of my friend Lee Israel. She has soundly disproved F. Scott Fitzgerald's tired axiom "There are no second acts in American lives." By my count, we're up to at least Lee's fourth act. And who knows, she may have even written that axiom. Perhaps you've seen the New York Times' profile of her or stellar book review, or various other media mentions. The book in question, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, chronicles Lee's shady days as a literary forger.

Act I was as a celebrity biographer. But I met her well after that, when she was hired as a copy editor at the publishing company where I'm employed. At least twice the age of most of the staff, and with a unique appearance and demeanor, Lee definitely stood out. It was clear from early on that Lee did not play well with others. (In one of our earliest encounters, she strongly scolded polite little me for making too much noise.) She repeatedly claimed that the work we were doing was below her. She had been a "star." Sure, it could've come across as glory-days posturing. But when Act III rolled along, many realized that Lee had some legitimacy. For that was the heyday of the basic-cable biography shows. Lee showed up as a talking head on such programs as E!'s Mysteries and Scandals, providing background on her biography subjects Dorothy Kilgallen and Estee Lauder. I was proud of Lee. Heck, it was just cool to see someone I knew on TV.

Around the office, her sharp wit was often evident. Once, I brought a group of schoolchildren around on a tour. Different coworkers explained their jobs. When we stopped at Lee's desk, I asked her to tell them the difference between a proofreader and a copy editor. With flawless comic timing, Lee replied, "About 15-thousand a year."

However, she had a mean streak. I remember how excited I was to show Lee that I'd finally gotten a long humor piece published in the Times. I pointed out to her that it only appeared in the New Jersey edition. "Still in the balcony seats, I see," was her withering response. So that stung a little. And I was her friend. If you weren't on her good side, watch out. She could be downright nasty. Doubly so if she'd had a double scotch with lunch. Or as lunch.

Though she did spill the beans to a coworker or two, I knew nothing of her previous life of crime (Act II). When I eventually learned of her literary forgery, it didn't surprise me. She had sent me many convincing emails in the voice of Koko the sign-language gorilla.

All the while, it seemed like she might be crying wolf—or signing gorilla?—on a return to glory. The Kilgallen book had been once again optioned. Anne Heche was attached to the project. Showtime was interested. And yet… nothing ever came of it.

Her tenure at my company came to an end (and it wasn't pretty). We stayed in touch, emailing, and the occasional dinner with a stiff drink. I worried about her, as her finances were always shaky, and it's obviously difficult to find work when you're older. And all the more difficult when you're difficult.

And then one day, she told me her memoirs were to be published. By Simon-and-freaking-Schuster! Evidently the New Yorker had rejected the story as an essay, but an editor there was so impressed that he passed it along.

So Act IV has finally arrived. I couldn't have predicted the widespread attention the book has received, on both sides of the Atlantic. Certainly my workplace is abuzz, some happy, some shocked, some scandalized that a criminal was within their midst. Me, I was just giddy to receive a signed copy in the mail (though I doubted the Cabo San Lucas return address). And then really pleased that it was such a fun, funny read. So interesting to learn about (literal) chapters of a friend's life that I knew so little about, and comforting to know her strong personality was fully in place long before I encountered it. I raise a glass to you, Lee. Yes, of course it's single-malt Scotch.

Spotted: Traffic cone array in Westlake Village