...Trapped In A Man's Body

I'm Patty, which ambiguous dyke are you? Quiz by Turi.


I'm not sure I'm that sporty. I feel I am way more Marcie. But this will do.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: And you?

Wall To Wall BotBall

Every weekend this month, my son has some sort of activity related to school. My son takes a class where they compete in several local robotics competitions. Pictures from all of these are in this Flickr set.

Because of all of these activities back to back, wife is calling May Nerd Month. This week, we spent all day Saturday at Ritchie Coliseum at the University of Maryland College Park watching my son’s school compete at the regional BotBall competition. For those of you familiar with BattleBots and other Discovery Channel staples, BotBall is the tamer high school cousin. Each year the organizers come up with a bizarre scenario and then teams of kids have to build and program robots to perform the tasks.



This year’s challenge was based on some pineapple plantation motif where the robots among other things had to do any or all of the following to score points:

• Put cocktail drink umbrellas in little pieces of plastic pipe.
• Move the plastic pipes into the back area of the field.
• Put yellow and green fuzzballs into yellow and green cups.
• Put large blue rubber balls into the cups.
• Protect the field from orange puffballs that get dropped on the field.

For a full description, you can watch this video.

My son’s team focused on the first two tasks. They had another robot that was a fuzzball sweeper, but it wasn’t quite ready for primetime. As the video shows, the robot does a pretty good job with the pipes and the umbrellas.

By focusing on doing one thing well, the robot was able to advance to the Sweet Sixteen from a field of 42. My second video shows two of the best teams in the semi-finals. The team on the right won because they got both blue balls in the cups even though the other team deflected some of "lava" puffballs.



Nerd Month continues next week as the Rocketry Club goes to the TARC nationals to compete amongst a hundred teams from around the country. More video and pictures to come.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Robots – lame, awesome, or scary?

Baby Blue Blues

Yesterday, Joel Achenbach blogged about the terrors of having a teen driver, which is a very blogworthy topic I will get to someday, but like anything in the Boodle, it veered slightly of-topic into tales of learning to drive and first cars. The first car I drove regularly was a pumpkin orange VW Super Beatle I discuss briefly here and here, but the first car I owned in my own name was a 1979 Toy-auto Corolla.


I had gotten a co-op job in Atlanta but needed some transportation to get back and forth to work since freshman. My dad in sincere generosity (that’s you, flyboy) found me a car and told me to come and get it. I took a sixteen hour bus ride to Tampa and drove it back to Atlanta, the first of many times that car would make that trip.

It was a two-door with a 1200cc engine, black vinyl seats and no air-conditioning. The black-seat/no-AC combo always made a trip to Florida a test in logistics. I either traded fatigue for daylight and drove the eight hours at night or built in extra time to stop at every Dairy Queen on I-75. Several times I investigated adding AC but I think you had to have at least 1.6 liters under the hood to have enough spare horsepower to drive the compressor.

That car went all over the place. I took it to Cherry Hill, New Jersey one year just to mooch some Thanksgiving turkey. It wore ruts in I-85 going back and forth between Atlanta and my wife’s college in western North Carolina. It was on these trips that I learned all the words to every track on Hotel California. One time I ferried four other people at my wife’s college up to an away football in eastern Tennessee. Going up hills on I-40, the speedometer would sag until it bottomed out at about 45 miles per hour. The eighteen wheelers would downshift to pass and honk at me.

After about a year of owning it, I noticed another Corolla in the parking lot whose roof had faded through to the primer was beginning to rust. I got proactive and took the car to Earl Scheib for the any-car any-color special. The dirty secret at Earl’s being that ninety-nine dollars didn’t include colors found on cars in the wild. I picked baby blue, which made my car very easy to find in parking lots.

With the engine being so small and simple, I did most of my own minor repairs. I dutifully changed the oil, distributor cap, and spark plugs as needed. Once right before leaving work for the swingshift run to Tampa, it threw a fan belt. Amazingly, I happened to have a spare in the trunk. I changed it in the parking lot and didn’t even lose any time. For bigger jobs like the water pump, alternator and brake master cylinder, I found a shade tree mechanic that worked for cash. The car was nearly bulletproof.

After three years and 100,000 miles on top of the 50,000 it came with, my beloved car came to an ignoble end. On a rainy morning I was cruising in rush hour traffic to get to class and I hit a huge puddle on I-85. The car bounced off the median jersey wall and spun 540 degrees at it slid across four lanes of traffic and landed facing backwards on the shoulder. The only person I nearly hit was an eight-month pregnant lady on her way to the doctor. She gave me a ride to a pay phone and I had the car towed to a dealer.

They wanted nearly a thousand dollars to replace the bent axle. I made the sad decision to take the car behind the barn. A junk dealer gave me two hundred dollars in cash and a ride back to campus. He claimed he was going to have to break it for parts since there was no market for the nearly indestructible Toyota engines. Three months later, at a traffic light on Buford Highway, I saw a baby blue Corolla with a distinctive rust patch by the trunk key hole. I had been lied to by the junk dealer, but I was glad to see my car back on the road.

Cars hold a special place in a guy’s heart, somewhere between faithful pets and old girlfriends. They may have faults, but they always bring back fond memories. Mine are colored baby blue.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What was your first car and what happened to it?

Kool Kinetics

I was back at the Baltimore Museum of Industry again last weekend. This time I was observing my wife's school's entries in the elementary theme park challenge. By an odd scheduling quirk, it was the same day as the American Visionary Art Museum's Kinetic Sculpture Race.

The kids finished their presentation and had a few hours to kill before the awards were presented. Fortunately, that was about the time the sculptures started rolling down the road. These racers have to be human powered and they were so in a number of very inventive ways.



The Platypus Racer was one of the first ones to come by. They really had the spirit of the event with matching costumes. The entourages that rode along with the racers sometimes enormous.



For the next hour a steady parade of racers turned onto Key Highway as the early leg of the race. One of the best racers as far as craftsmanship was Air Farce One.



When the BMI event was over, we moved over to Boston Street near Canton and managed to get an incredible parking spot. I got there in time to catch some of the last racers doing the water portion of the race. This section was perhaps the most challenging. The racer has to go down a boat ramp, float around the dock, and get back up the ramp.



Getting up the ramp was the trickiest part. The ramp was steep and say too many racers didn't have the power or traction to get all the way up. Most required a push and the accompanying time penalty to get onto dry land.



While the bike/boats were getting wet, the other racers were waiting for the next leg. This was a great chance for me to go down the road and get pictures of all the entrants. My favorite was the Wiley Coyote themed racer with all the kinectanauts dressed as the ill-fated predator and one of the crew members all road-runnered up.



I put a bunch more pictures into a Flickr group, so check them out.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What is your favorite whacky event?

Fedora Adorer

I usually avoid posting pictures of my son out of fear he may someday find them and post embarrassing pictures of me to his Xanga or Facebook or DeviantArt page or whatever social network he is using nowadays. One of the last pictures I posted of him was of him getting his face painted while wearing a jester hat.

For the longest time he has been wanting to get dark blue highlights in his hair. His mother has been steadfast in disallowing this. Lately, he started lobbying for a fedora. We have no idea where this fascination started, but he went so far as to find out where to buy one. It seems a shop at HarbourPlace, Baltimore’s touristy destination at the Inner Harbor, sells all sorts of hats including fedoras, berets, top hats, and those ballcaps with straws that hold two beers. A hat is a far more reversible fashion statement than colored hair.

About a week ago the weather was gorgeous and I decided we hadn’t been tourists in our own town in ages. We went down to the Inner Harbor and paid too much for parking, ate faux Irish food, watched a bad juggler, and wandered around through the crowds.

My son got his fedora and he has been wearing it wherever he can ever since. I do have to admit he makes it work. He actually stood still long enough for me to take this picture with the USS Constellation and the Hard Rock Cafe guitar in the background. Maybe the next picture will be if and when he finally gets those highlights in his hair.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Where do you draw the line with your kid’s fashion statements.

SciFi Countdown

Entertainment Weekly in one of its frequent paeans to its inner geek has compiled a list of the top 25 science fiction movies or series of the last 25 years. The time limit keeps Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back out of the running and the three prequels don’t make the cut. Being a little discriminating and not quite a total a complete nerd, I am only familiar enough with about twelve of the list. Here are my opinions on ones I can give a valid opinion on. Click on the links to see what EW had to say.

24. Galaxy Quest: The best fanboy homage ever. Non-fans can view it as mocking the genre. True believers recognize the truth. The meta-casting of Sigourney Weaver alone is brilliant.

21. Futurama: Unevenly funny. It takes a real shotgun approach to the cultural references by throwing everything against the wall, but only a few things stick.

19. Starship Troopers. Despite it’s attempt at social satire, it’s still a bunch of kids shooting at giant bugs.

18. Heroes: Right now, one of my few must-see shows. The real test will be in Season 2 to see if they can hold the momentum.

15. Firefly/Serenity: Avery good show that suffers from raised expectations by its rather rabid fan base. It’s a very entertaining series, but it’s not THAT good.

13. Terminator/Terminator 2: As a pair, perhaps the best time travel paradox story ever filmed. And plenty of great kick-ass action.

12. Back To The Future: Another excellent time travel story that appeals to all genders and generations. This one was marred instead of enhanced by the sequels.

8. Star Trek: The Next Generation: In quality, breadth, and scope the TNG franchises eclipse TOS. The mid-run episodes (Seasons 3 to 6) were often great 45 minute long mini-movies that were better than most theatrical releases. I prefer Deep Space 9, but I know I’m in the minority. Voyager is where the concept ran out of gas and they should have never attempted Enterprise.

7. ET: A Citizen Kane level work of genius. “Happy” Spielberg at his pinnacle.

5. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: I actually prefer ST:IV, but without the second movie showing that a good Star Trek movie can be made, the series would have ended here.

3. Blade Runner: A paradigm shifting work of art direction. The sheer denseness of the look inspired a lot of good (and bad) cyperpunk literature. It’s not often cinematic science fiction affects the written versions this significantly.

2. Battlestar Galactica: The Best Show On Television™. As I mentioned in a previous blogpost, it shows what ST:Voyager should have been and then kicks it up another level. For gritty political intrigue and commentary it tops even The West Wing. Season 3 stretched on a little long, but the first three episodes and the season finale are worth the entire season.

1. The Matrix: Another paradigm shifter from a special effects point of view, but not a lot of new grand was broken storywise. The legacy of the original movie will be forever marred by the increasingly awful sequels.

The notable omission on the EW list is Babylon 5. I never watched it enough to become involved in the storyline because the truly dismal acting drove me away. I know Deep Space 9 was a complete rip-off, but the Federation folk did it better. Also missing are Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Dark Angel. I guess the editors at EW have something against kick-boxing hotties.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What would you add to the list or demote?

Industry Visionary

Living in the Baltimore/Washington area is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to museums, which sometimes means smaller quirkier places get overlooked. The south side of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor has two such places, the Museum of Industry and the American Visionary Art Museum. If you are driving down Key Highway on your way to Fort McHenry you may miss them entirely.

Last Saturday, my son has a competition for an engineering class at the Museum of Industry which is a large converted factory on the waterfront. When the event was over I talked him into going to AVAM to check out the truly bizarre artwork they have there. The juxtaposition made me realize that the two museums had more in common than one would think. Here are some examples:

The Front Door

Large Object In Courtyard

Huge Crane

Abandoned Stuff

Sunken Ship

Ball of Bras

Competition Being Sponsored on May 5

Story Theme Park Ride Challenge Elementary school kids design and build a theme park ride based on their favorite book. The sculpture must include moving parts showing how the ride works.

The Kinetic Sculpture Race Art school drop-outs design and build enormous vehicles out of recycled materials that have to go around and across the Inner Harbor without falling apart.

As fate would have it, I will be back at the Museum of Industry this weekend which is along the Kinetic Sculpture course. I hope to get pictures and/or video of both events. Come out and enjoy the fun.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What is your favorite obscure museum?

Books First - April 2007

Books Bought

I is for Innocent by Sue Grafton
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, read by Ethan Hawke

Books Read

Dog Days by Ana Marie Cox
Schrödinger’s Ball by Adam Felber
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Comments

Since I already own at least one edition of every Vonnegut book, there was nothing I had to run out and buy in the aftermath of the very surprising outpouring after his death. I have had my eye on this unabridged reading of his most celebrated book for awhile, so I finally justified buying it to myself as a grief-reducing splurge.

Back in August, I read Washingtonienne, Jessica Cutler’s roman a clef about her exposure as a floozy working and sleeping on Capitol Hill, occasionally for money. An important character in breaking her story was Ana Marie Cox a/k/a Wonkette, the political gossip blogger. Naturally, Dog Days tells the story of a blogger with questionable morals. Rather than hew tightly to the Washingtonienne script, Cox instead comes up with a tale with a slightly more sympathetic character. Her heroine is working on a presidential campaign but sleeping with a married TV pundit. Her best friend talks her into creating a fictitious slutty blogger to shift the news cycle away from her personal life. Hilarity ensues. Or at least it should have. While the book has plenty of snarky caricatures, the story is a little flat. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the book pulls it’s punches a little in the name of verisimilitude. The characters are real and the inside baseball politics is large plausible. I just expected a little more chaos and a slightly sharper edge.

When I was browsing through the Kendall Square Coop, I ran across Schrödinger’s Ball which is Adam Felber’s mind bending tale loosely based on quantum physics. The book has at least five interlocking stories, one of which is told in the second person plural. When Johnny Felix Decaté kills himself in his grandmother’s basement he sets off a non-deterministic set of events that affect his remaining friends including the hypersexual Debbie and uber-geek Grant who secretly and not too discretely lusts after her. There is also a wacko separatist and a schizophrenic homeless lady. The tone and style is very heavy on the Tom Robbins with just a hint of Vonnegut thrown in. The book finally pulls all the threads together in a clever and satisfying way.

The last time I read a graphic novel, it was a redressed superhero epic. The graphic novel I read this month, Fun House, is way more Angela’s Ashes than Avengers. Alison Bechdel is the author of the long-running and very funny alternative comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Fun House contrasts Alison’s sexual awakening with the discovery of her father’s long closeted homosexuality just before his accidental death. The titular house is the part-time funeral parlor her father runs when not working as an English teacher the local high school. These topics guarantee to be a barrel of laughs. Interspersed into the narrative are long allusions to the works of Proust and Joyce among others. What is most surprising about the book is the pacing. It had a structure and rhythm that added to the bittersweet story. The illustrations are detailed and revealing. She draws herself a little like Mo, my favorite of the DTWOF cast. Watch out for this book and read it if you get a chance.