2011.03 minutiae

• I had to watch a movie from 2002 for work. It was weird to see a "high tech" room full of CRTs.

• Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac-Man, on how he came up with the premise of the game: I thought about something that may attract girls. Maybe boy stories or something to do with fashion. However, girls love to eat desserts. My wife often does! So the verb "eat" gave me a hint to create this game.

• I am on record saying that one thing I don't like about my current residence is that people are always pounding on my front door. That said, I certainly didn't object when I ran out of cookies and five minutes later there was a knock on the door and it was the Girl Scouts.

• Vermont state auditor Tom Salmon on the possibility of running against Bernie Sanders for the U.S. Senate: I need to be an authentic self-utilizing power along the lines of excellence. Man, don't we all.

• I wish French food weren't so meat-o-centric. It occurred to me recently that a lot of my favorite places around here are French — La Note, La Bedaine, Grégoire — but I've only sampled a small fraction of their fare. Pretty much the only thing I can get at La Note after breakfast is the ratatouille; at La Bedaine, I'm pretty much limited to the desserts (but what desserts!); at Grégoire, it's two lunch items plus one dinner item per month. Hélas !

• Here is a picture I took last year in Crescent City, California — you can even see my reflection in it. I took it because I wanted to get a closeup of the upper icon with the guy flailing helplessly in the face of the onrushing tsunami. As it turns out, Crescent City was the site of the one tsunami casualty in North America, a guy who disregarded this very sign, ran out to get pictures of the waves, and was swept out to sea.

• So one morning I woke up to find a tsunami alert, and the next I woke up to alarms as the apartment building two doors down from me caught on fire. It was a big deal: fire trucks from Albany, Berkeley, and Richmond all came to my corner, the streets were all closed off, and the neighborhood smelled like burning vomit for hours. It was the first time I've ever heard someone screaming, "HELLLP!!" in real life, and I later learned that one resident died. (Here's a wrap-up.)

• Informative!

• I Don't Recognize Any of Today's "Celebrities" Department: There's a "Nate Dogg"? Isn't that a little close to "Scott Evil"?

• I guess my lot as a screenwriter could be worse. I may not be a big fan of the various studio strictures I have to work under, but at least I'm not handed the premises I saw on someone else's CV, which included such gems as "a coyote is the only thing standing between the U.S. and nuclear destruction" and "a wise but prissy cat helps children in trouble while teaching about foreign cultures."

• AP: "I don't think there was any luck involved," Tyndall said. "We were just very, very fortunate"

• Much as I like the idea of people knowing and interacting with their neighbors in theory, in practice I am way too much of a hermit to deal with that sort of thing. This month I was disturbed on multiple occasions by the sound of metal clanking right outside my door, and finally I went out to find that there was a big metal chain attached to my patio fence. So I took it off. A few minutes later the neighbor, this wizened little chain-smoker with a thin mustache, pounds on my door and demands to know what the big idea is. I asked him, politely, if he could maybe stop waking me up by messing with my fence. "All right," he sneers, "then I won't mow yer lawn either!" Uh... wtf was he doing mowing another house's lawn in the first place? I guess he worked out some deal with my landlord wherein he could tie his dog up to my fence and let the dog crap in my yard so long as he mowed it every so often, or something? Do not want.

• space.com: Saturday's full moon appeared 14 percent larger and 30 percent bigger than the smallest full moons Earth sees. Not to mention 48 percent greater in size!

• Speaking of the moon, I was pretty wowed by this memo that William Safire wrote for the Nixon White House in case the Apollo 11 astronauts wound up marooned. It goes on for a bit after the part I posted... Elizabeth was particularly struck by the reference to the astronauts' wives as "widows-to-be."

• I keep misspelling "Aeolic" as "Aoelic" because the latter is so much easier to type on a Dvorak keyboard.

• Kathryn Elizabeth Tuggle of foxbusiness.com suggests using this line at your next job interview: "I enjoyed reading about your corporate achievements in the paper last month."

• I was amused at just how amazingly patronizing this old Mac ad is: "Some mice have two buttons. Macintosh has one. So it's extremely difficult to push the wrong button." Sheesh. I guess I should just be glad that Apple never branched out into plumbing.

• I had one of just 5536 out of over 5.9 million ESPN brackets to have six or more Elite Eight teams correct. Why? Because I picked USC to make the regional final, and when VCU inherited that line by winning the play-in I forgot to go back and fix it.

• Have you ever looked at a map of Malta? Those place names! Mġarr! Iż-Żebbuġ! Ħal Għaxaq! Ta' Xbiex! L-Imtaħleb! Marsaxlokk!

• And speaking of names, I guess it stands to reason that Qaddafi / Gadhafi / Kadafi should come from Surt / Sirt / Sirte / Syrte.

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