Category: life

where everything else happens

WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER

Wil Wheaton’s Geek in Review: WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER, Part I
Wil Wheaton’s Geek in Review: WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER, Part II

Ok, so I have this William Shatner story that I have to tell. If anyone knows Mr. Wheaton (or even has a TypeKey account so they can comment on his blog) and can pass along the URL, maybe he’ll get a chuckle out of it.

The scene is New York City, in the autumn of 1988. I had recently married Sue (9/9/88…. guess who picked that hard-to-forget date?), and my parents lived in NYC at the time. My dad was transferred there for work on a two year assignment and they decided to “live like tourists” for those two years and experience NYC to the fullest. Sue & I flew out from Seattle and stayed with them for about 4 or 5 days. Mom & Dad had met Sue just once, very briefly before we for all practical purposes, eloped, so this was a more formal “get to know Chuck’s new wife” visit. We too were swept up in the “Goolsbee’s Do Manhattan” theme. Sue had never been in NYC, so she was awestruck by it all. The whole time she was playing up her whole country girl persona and asking when we would see a celebrity. None were to be found. My parents took us and my little sister (who was in high school at the time) to a Broadway play. “Phantom Of The Opera” (I found it to be rather lame and overdone… but I guess all my years of art school ruined me for appreciating simple melodrama.)

So Sue & I were sitting in our seats, waiting for the show to start. My parents and sister were sitting in the row in front of us, a little to our left. Our seats were perfect (too bad the play sucked) right in the middle of this huge slice of parabola that was this very nice theater. Sue is chatting with my sister diagonally in front of her as I’m just sort of scanning around at the architecture. My eye catches sight of … you guessed it “WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER” edging down our direction from the right side of the theater, but two rows below. I nudge my wonderful wife and whisper, “You wanted to see a celebrity? Well here comes William Shatner.” I see my little sister’s eyes light up, and Sue says ‘Who is that?” I answer: “You know… Captain Kirk.”

What followed was one of those exquisite moments in time. Where physics seems to become irrelevant and time suspends and elongates. Here we were in a huge, crowded, acoustically perfect space. There were hundreds, if not over a thousand people all around us, every one of them murmmering their little conversations while they passed the time awaiting the rest of the crowd and the dimming of the lights. Sue, finally getting her wish, was basking in the presence of celebrity… even if she really wasn’t sure the stature of the celebrity she was in close proximity to. WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER (thanks Wil!) was accompanied by a woman, who was shuffling along the row of seats in front of him. Just as the two of them passed directly in front of me, time and space distorted even further and at that very moment came one of those silent pauses in a crowd where all noise ceases. It was as if every person in the entire theatre had just completed their sentence, hitting the terminal punctuation mark with a pause for breath, in a perfectly synchronous, simultaneous fashion. That silent pause was just long enough for all echoes to settle and be absorbed. At that very moment you could have heard a pin drop.

Except no pin dropped.

Instead my wife opened her mouth and uttered in her rarely used, but distinct Oregonian Hick tone:

“He’s SO fat!!”

Those three words filled the acoustically perfect, and perfectly silent-for-a-fraction-of-a-second-before-and-after, gigantic space of the theater. The words blurted out and orbited the space. They travelled at the speed of sound and reflected off every surface of that theater and were absorbed by every human being there. Eardrums wiggled and three tiny bones did their little jitterbug dance to the tune of my wife’s flat Oregonian-by-way-of Alaska accent. I felt like a black hole had just opened in the seat next to me and the universe did a huge optical zooming effect towards us. I gasped “Sue!” an instinctively shrank a few sizes in an attempt to blend in with the velour pattern of my padded seat. It was one of those moments that could have provoked an interstellar war lasting generations. Thankfully before a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers unleashed electric death, the vast murmur of the crowd returned.

WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER never even blinked. But the sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruiser female companion of his rotated her weapon turret towards my wife and flashed her twin phaser banks while narrowing the firing slits in a very threatening manner.

If looks could kill, I would have been widowed before my first anniversary.

Weird coincidences

I just got off the phone with my father. He is in the Houston, TX airport, about to board a plane for Buenos Aires, and subsequently Santiago. This is a trip with my mother scheduled probably about a year ago… well BEFORE we knew that Christopher was going to be in Chile. Of course Santiago is over 500 miles from where Chris is living. But, to add even more irony to the situation, Christopher’s host family is travelling to Santiago tomorrow, and staying through the 20th! Their daughter is leaving as an AFS exchange student to Japan for one year. (can you imagine flying from Santiago to Tokyo? What a marathon!)

We’ve been trying to coordinate a meeting, which is difficult between three parties and over 70 degrees of Latitude, even with email and cellular phones! My father finally confirmed, just prior to boarding, that he has spoken with Christopher, and his host-father Gerardo, and they have made the arrangements. I had my dad pick up a book to bring down to Chris, as it seems he has almost run out of reading material (which made up half of his luggage!)

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Oh, the photo above is Christopher, in an especially geeky teen-age moment, during the Seattle Jaguar Club’s Mt. Rainier drive a few years ago. It has no relation to any of the above, I just figured the post needed a picture of Chris. 😉

A Sunday Drive.

Sorry about the fuzzy phone-cam shot… like an idiot I left my “real” camera in the barn when we drove out!)

My friend Dan O’Donnell is in town this week on business. I’ve “known” Dan for a dozen years… since 1995. To but a more dramatic scale on it, since he was 38 and I was 31! Oddly enough, though the bizarre nature of “Internet Friendship” we never met face to face until just a few years ago. Funny how that works. We do have a lot in common and know a lot about each other as a result. I almost bought a vintage car from him in the late 90s (a 911sc targa), and later, when he was trapped in a job-from-hell scenario, I made an introduction (I think we’re supposed to call that “social networking” now) that resulted in Dan landing a dream job. I love it when that happens. Since that day, he’s promised me a dinner as a “thank you” for that intro, and he finally settled that debt this weekend.

Dan celebrated his 50th birthday this past Saturday and I was privileged to have him spend it with me & Sue, at our favorite local restaurant in Arlington. It was an odd accident of schedule that our long-delayed dinner fell on his birthday, so it was odd to have him buying dinner. In exchange I gladly nabbed a wonderful Pinot Noir from the Captain’s List. I know Sue thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, so a fine time was had by all.

The weather I’m sure was a shock to his Southern California system, as he arrived at Sea-Tac on some pre-dawn flight from LAX into drizzle and low clouds… topped off by the melting remains of an eight inch snowfall up at our house up in the Cascade foothills. In preparation I had a fire going in the fireplace and despite what I recognized as a rapid warming trend (the snow disappeared in a matter of hours), he was obviously appreciative of the extra warmth afforded by the fire. In fact, when it died off he sheepishly asked if I’d stoke it up. We enjoyed an afternoon of just chatting. Dan’s had a rough time of late as his father recently passed away, quite suddenly. We talked a lot about fathers, sons, and family relationships… and he had the opportunity to witness it all as I fielded calls from both my father and Christopher, who made an unexpected call from Chile Saturday afternoon.

When we returned from dinner, the stars were out and I made a bold prediction that we’d have a sunny Sunday. Sunny enough to take the E-type out for a drive. Well, I was wrong and we awoke to high overcast. Undaunted, we took the Jag out anyway. The roads were dry, but it was quite … “brisk.” I drove the car east on SR 530 to the location of the famous “Miss January” photo, where we got out of the car and admired Whitehorse Mountain. I invited Dan to take the left seat for the trip home and from that moment on, he just had this goofy grin on his face.

Like all genuine “car guys” he treated the machine with respect and tenderness, but could not resist the temptation to play with the loud pedal now and then. Doing that just made him grin even more. I got the distinct impression that he enjoyed it. I enjoyed it too.

Hypocrisy in the Middle East

Hypocrisy in the Middle East
“If honest democratic elections were held throughout the Middle East tomorrow, many countries would elect religious fundamentalist leaders hostile to the United States.”

In six short paragraphs this Congressman has summarized exactly why the US’ actions in the middle east over the past six years have been complete blunders. As Robert David Steele, the founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Command famously said: “America has begun a hundred-year war on six different fronts precisely because the President lacked intelligence in every sense of the word”

The boobs in the White House have gone off half-cocked in all the wrong directions, over and over again. Completely unable and unwilling to finish what they start. If you recall the initial attacks were to bring Osama bin Laden “to justice”… well they abandonded that after a while and decided to institute a “regime change”… leaving that job unfinished, they then dropped that to win an election at home… something they actually accomplished, but with the message “stay the course.” I kept asking “What Course?” but nobody ever answered that question. Go figure. Now they’ve decided to “bring democracy to Iraq.”

Congressman Paul states the obvious point that I have always made, which is IF we allowed the citizens of these Arab nations actually vote in free elections, they all vote for Mullahs. Mullahs whose campaign promises and platform would all be “Death to America!”

Even a dim bulb like George W. Bush should be able to figure that out, right?

Apparently not.

Christopher’s first email from Chile

The beach was nice, but the pacific seems to be cold no matter where I go whether it be Alaska, Washington or Chile. I religiously applied sunscreen and avoided the sun as much as possible, but I managed to burn the one part of me I didnt expect to get burned or bother to apply sunscreen, back of my damn hands.

We received our first email from Chris in Chile today!

I emailed friends and family with his contact details last week. If you would like them let me know via email. (note: If you READ rather than click the “contact me via email” link over there in the right-hand column you can figure out how to contact me.)

He sounds well, and as I suspected is not quite up to speed with his Spanish language skills, but that will sort itself out naturally as time goes on.

The Truth About Cars | At some point in the not-so-distant future…

The Truth About Cars | At some point in the not-so-distant future…
“At the moment, car dealers’ profits increase in direct proportion to their ability to screw their customers and bilk the manufacturer.”

Farago does it again… distills the ills of an entire industry into one sentence. This is one of the reasons TTAC is by far my favorite “car” site on the Internet. The editorials and commentary are the most insightful and entertaining reading to be found on the subject. Anywhere.