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In retrospect, it was dumb for me to wear an ancient pair of blue jeans on a travel day.
I had purposefully packed old clothes, both to commemorate the weekend visit with old friends (thinking it would be clever to wear the same clothes this weekend as I was wearing when I met these guys, 8-12 years ago), and because I’d suspected I might be falling off the wagon into a bottle of frosty amber ale, and getting sloppy upon impact… but the lacing studs on my boots consistently set off the airport metal detector, and the frayed jeans consistently set off the airport security guards.
“Step over here please.” I stepped out of line and raised my arms as if I was about to be crucified, which is how I felt at the moment: under-rested, about to endure abuse, and being laughed at by two of the guys I’d been drinking with all weekend, both of whom had passed unscathed through the apparent cultural profiling at this security checkpoint, even though neither was dressed even as nicely as I… one of them, in fact, was wearing the same pants he’d been drinking in all weekend — old brown corduroys with the pantslegs hacked off in an apparent Mission-District imitation of a cuff — and a pair of Dr. Martens so old, that when they were in medical school the curriculum included a course in “Leeches”. My jeans were only slightly more ratty, but a lot more clean, not that the security guard was going to do a sniff test, which, all things considered, was probably for the best.
Anyway, I braced myself for the second “wanding” of the weekend. This wand operator was a lot more thorough than the previous one. He had a little stepstool for me to put one leg up on, to better invade my personal space (yeah, I mean the part between my legs) with his little battery-powered toy. “Does that thing vibrate?” I asked. He wasn’t amused. “I mean, so long as you’re pressing it into my crotch.”
He ignored my beery taunts and proceeded with the inspection. He even announced what he was doing as he patted me down: “I’m going to touch your back now… I’m going to touch your thigh now…” I wondered if this is what it feels like to be at the OBGYN, minus the stirrups and the fact that I still had my pants on.
Finally, having exhausted any possibility of discovering contraband that would not require a cavity search to reveal, the guard made me sit down and take my boots off. And then, boots in hand, he walked away! He delivered my boots to the X-ray technician, and from the distance, turned to me and mouthed, “You’re free to go,” waving dismissively down the hall to where my buddies were chatting, no doubt commenting on my high intellect, good looks, and strong moral character in the face of unpleasant public groping by an airport security guard while they waited.
“What about my shoes?!” I yelled. He shrugged at me from the distance. That’ll teach me to make dildo jokes, I thought.
So I walked over to wait for my shoes to be irradiated for the second time in three days, wondering if I should invest in lead-lined socks, like those heavy aprons they make you wear at the dentist’s office. Of course, the shoes passed the X-ray inspection without comment or complication, because I’d taken the precaution of hiding within my navel the portable nuclear warhead I’d been smuggling back from Cincinnati.
I picked up my boots and bag and prepared to face the gauntlet of ridicule my friends had prepared in the 10 minutes I’d been fending off your government’s best attempt since my last audit to find some reason to arrest me… when yet another security weasel appeared and shouted “Bring your bag over here!”
This is the point that I really would have begun to get upset, if I hadn’t been so “heavily sedated.” Why couldn’t they have swabbed my bag for bomb residue while I was getting felt up by the guy with the wand? “Because I can’t do this unless you’re here,” says the swab technician, demonstrating a decidedly mixed view of respect for passengers’ privacy.
The funny epilogue to this dreary episode is that, through all the inspections, examinations, and interrogations, I had a nail clipper in my carry-on, and none of the security blockheads had the presence of mind to confiscate it.
Here’s a rhythmic treat for your dominant hand. Trust me; it’s tired of playing eighth notes. And your band is tired of hearing them.
To compensate for the added complexity of the ride hand, which has your addled synapses thinking “No, it’s e+ damnit!”, the snare and kick patterns have been streamlined, cut back to the minimum necessary inputs that will still make the soccer-moms at the PTA gig shake their upper-middle-class booties.
If your band has a percussionist, he’ll thank you for this beat — there’s a lot of room to solo within the pulse.
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 4 HH x x x x xx xx 1/4 = 112 - SD o o 4 KD o oo
Patronize these links, man:
Scanning the web for drummers tonight, I discovered a page of photos of Danny Gottlieb. Gee, that top picture sure looks familiar… because I took it! Here is the original Gottlieb photo, from my Drummer Gallery (which, I must warn you, has not been updated in 3 years).
Hmm, it seems my images of Terry Bozzio and J.R. Robinson have been liberated too.
One of the most irritating arguments I hear against efforts to increase privacy is beautifully summed up, and eviscerated by Dan Gillmor (SJ Mercury News columnist) in Want Privacy? Take Action:
Another scenario is the “forget about it” system, which holds that privacy is gone and we might as well get used to it. In this world, you do have a choice if you don’t enjoy having your every move tracked, and your data dispersed widely. But the choice is absurd, since it prevents access to the benefits of society, not just the drawbacks of lost privacy.
(The choice, which Gillmor does not describe, is to pull a Kaczynski — basically, move to a remote shack in Montana and live a somewhat bad-smelling life among the wildebeests and lack of plumbing. To be clear, it is not necessary to send explosives through the mail to adopt this pro-privacy stance.)
I spent the weekend (2 weeks ago) designing a new website — something I have not done since this journal went online in late 2000.
Here’s the site: stlouiscelticcross.com
It uses CSS heavily, but not exclusively. I would have expected CSS support in modern browsers to be a lot further along than it is, given that CSS was introduced in 1996. But the process of making a CSS-based site look right in even the recent browsers makes for a frustrating, teeth-gnashing, no-fun weekend.
The art of CSS is the art of piling hacks upon hacks, without having the whole mess come crumbling down. (Tip: just load up your CSS-based site in IE5/Win to see Eiffel-tower-as-pick-up-sticks.) CSS authors, perhaps due to their backgrounds as designers (by which I mean: non-programmers), seem to seek out cross-platform compatibility within the stylesheet itself, rather than doing what I would consider more natural, because I’ve had to do it for most web projects for the past seven years: detecting on the server side what browser is being used, and serving up customized content to fit.
I see the appeal of the client-side solution. I recently discovered that an old site of mine, which used browser detection on the server to tweak the javascript-based navigation, was failing in Mozilla 0.9.X because I hadn’t had the foresight, in 1998, to predict that ‘Mozilla/5' would eventually be widely used. (And in my defense, it still isn’t!) The client-side solutions advocated by designers appear to be less likely to suffer from this sort of version-specific breakage, in that the hacks they employ tend to be based on capabilities rather than version numbers. In other words, any browser with the specific capability will work, regardless of its version number — so, in theory, 5 years from now the page will work for everyone, even though its CSS has not been tweaked to accomodate the pecularities of newer browsers. Of course, this very much remains to be seen.
Hacks upon hacks… here is a crash-course:
Sharp-eyed readers may recognize the core design of the stlouiscelticcross.com site. See the site’s colophon for the credits.
If there’s a final lesson in all this, it is, as it has been for years, test your site. I spent 4 hours implementing the original site, which looked great in Mozilla/MacOS… and then another day trying to make the site work in IE/Win. Perhaps my mistake was in not designing for IE/Win originally — although my experience indicates that the various versions of that browser are so broken in so many different ways, it probably would not have helped.
