Well Done

Brian and Kay's wedding was awesome, as most of the readership of this blog knows (because most of the readership of this blog was there).

I'm in the process of moving, so I don't have much time to post, but I'll throw out a few thoughts on the past few days:

Brian was a great groom to attend on- he was the model of calm and good humor, and his only wish for the night before the wedding was for me to not stop drinking.  Wish granted.  Just for him.

Die Hard is an excellent movie.  Alan Rickman's performance made me want to hunt down all of his movies just in case I've missed any others.

I can always trust Absi to pull me through important things, like, say, a wedding speech that we coordinated while at the reception.  Hypothetically.

Champagne cake is a really excellent variety of cake. 

I can now call Kayface "Mrs. Paljug" and Brian "Mr. Kayface."  I'm so happy.  To everyone that I saw over the past few days to whom this statement applies: I love you all.  And well done, as Voldemort would say (youtube Voldemort Draco extended hug if you want in on the joke).

We've Always Been at War with Eastasia

I care deeply about the US default because I bet Tyler Brown a six-pack of beer and Tyler has expensive taste in beer.  My side of the bet is that we won't default, so I'm pro-anyone winning at this point, as long as they win soon enough that we don't default.  I'm going to ramble a bit- I don't have a point to make and I'm not a credible source about anything but I've really been enjoying watching this play out so I'm going to discuss my personal highlights of the debt crisis.

One of my favorite things about everything that has been going on is that the rhetoric and logical twisting from both sides have gone through the roof, and nothing pleases me more than a subtly misleading statement.  Something that both parties like to bring up is a metaphor comparing the U.S. debt to the credit card debt of the average American family.  This is a bad metaphor.  I know from having made many bad metaphors in my time and from the fact that governmental debt works in almost no way like consumer debt.  But hey, if they keep dumbing down the issue for whatever constituents they're trying to convince and it leads to one side winning... then great, I don't owe Tyler beer.

Brilliant political maneuvering from the right: I listened intently as a republican representative, when discussing what it meant to have a "balanced approach" to resolving the debt ceiling crisis, said something like "well we are being balanced.  We are agreeing to raise the debt limit- that's a huge concession from us- and we're just expecting a balance of spending cuts in return."  This is like if two farmers had a squabble over who owned a piece of land and during the talks about how to best divide it one of the farmers pulled a gun on the other and said "not shooting you is a huge concession and all I'm asking for is this land, which I think is a balanced and fair trade." (That's not a great metaphor, but it's better than the 'government debt is just like family debt' metaphor.)  Anyway, the whole "we've already made a concession" line is pretty great.

Brilliant political maneuvering from the left (even if they aren't selling it well): Reid's bill which seemingly does exactly what the Republicans asked for in cutting spending and adding no new taxes.  The catch?  Its calculations assume not just the winding down of wars (which is deceptive accounting on its own) but also the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2012, so if the Republicans vote for it now then they are implicitly signaling that they will not fight against the tax cuts expiring in the future.  Of course, they WILL fight against the tax cuts, but then the Democrats will have an amazing PR opportunity to destroy them for their hypocrisy.  Will they use it?  Probably not seeing as Democrats are terrible at getting their point across, but hey- if it passes then I don't owe Tyler beer. 

Something I don't see people talking about: in the event of a "downgrade," where are institutional investors with money that needs to be as safe as possible going to park their money?  Treasury auctions today suggest nowhere, as enthusiasm for our debt does not seem to be slipping in spite of being near the brink of "default."  European debt is no safer than ours (thanks, Euro!) and nongovernmental debt is way too risky for the kind of money that is used to purchase our bonds.  A debt spiral with rising interest rates is, unless I'm missing something big here, probably less of an issue than it has been made out to be.  There's also a good chance I'm missing something big here, because I'm a very casual observer of all these trends.

Another fascinating issue that has been brought up:  the 14th amendment (the validity of the US debt shall not be questioned) vs. only congress being the only body that can authorize spending.  Personally I don't think that the 14th can be invoked by the president to raise the debt ceiling, but I think it CAN be invoked to make sure that interest on any public bonds is paid off with whatever revenues we have before we can use those revenues for any other purposes.  Will that stop a downgrade?  No.  But speaking of downgrades, I think it's hilarious that we are being so reverential of the same ratings agencies that had no clue what they were doing when they rated subprime mortgage packages.  They have no meaningful data for how modern governmental defaults occur- they're just guessing.  Which is what they did with subprime mortgages because that was something else they had no historical data for.  Anyway, back to just paying off the bond interest.  This would not necessarily be a good thing but if being a strict constitutional constructionist is the cool thing to be nowadays it would be the most constitutional solution to not defaulting on debt (though we would default on all internal discretionary spending obligations and so I would still owe Tyler beer, so that doesn't fix things for me).

For some reason a passage from Utopia, by Sir Thomas More, comes to mind (even though it has nothing to do, really, with the current debt crisis- I think of this a lot in terms of how our government currently operates).

"If all else failed, they would take refuge in some remark like this: 'The way we're doing it is the way we've always done it, this custom was good enough for our fathers, and I only hope we're as wise as they were.' And with this deep thought they would take their seats".... "as though it would be a very dangerous matter if a man were found to be wiser in any point than his forefathers were.  As a matter of fact, we quietly neglect the best examples they have left us; but if something better is proposed, we seize the excuse of reverence for times past and cling to it desperately."

Sir Thomas More then adds (paraphrased): this has even happened in England, but just this one time a long time before our current awesome king, Henry VIII, gained the throne.  He's so awesome.  And manly.  And makes great decisions all the time.  Please don't cut off my head.

Heat Wave

I am currently anticipating the degree of difficulty that I will experience in law school to be directly proportional to the amount of fun that I'm having these few months before it starts.  So I'm pretty much screwed.  I am, however, hopeful that this heat wave will continue and inconvenience me so that school will maybe be a little easier later.  Yes, that's the way my mind works.

Yesterday I went into DC because my Dad was in town for a convention.  After reminding myself again on highway 295 why it was such a good thing I will be getting rid of my car, we met up at his hotel and metroed in to the city.  Our first stop was the campus, which he had not yet seen.  He requested that I stand for the obligatory picture, so I did.

Obligation fulfilled.

We then took a walk to the Mall area.  It was really hot so just walking that half mile had us sweating like we were in a sauna.  It was a very pretty day, though, so it wasn't so bad.  By the time we got to the Mall it was after six so I was planning on showing him the outsides of the museums (but not the insides since they all close at six).  This was sort of disappointing because he had never been in any of the Smithsonian museums and I knew that he would really like them especially the Air and Space Museum.  We walked up to that one to take a look through the glass at the various rockets and planes hanging from the ceiling and we noticed that there seemed to be a lot of people still inside.  A quick glance to the left revealed a sign that said "the museum is open til 7:30PM today."  Was that great luck or what?  I had completely forgotten that it was the day the final space shuttle touched down, and I'm assuming that's the reason this particular museum was open late.

Walking into the museum was worth it for the air conditioning alone, but I had also forgotten how amazing it was when not terribly crowded (which, lucky for us, it was not).  We spent some time looking at the Apollo 11 Command Module, which my Dad watched coverage of while it was orbiting the moon when he was eleven, and then looked through the whole Apollo exhibit.  Afterwards we went to the Wright Brothers Room, where I made Dad stand for the obligatory picture in front of the Wright Plane.

The placards around the plane were very adamant that this was the REAL plane which first flew that day in Kitty Hawk.  I realize that they could be lying and there's no way I would ever know the difference.

After the museum we went to Mexican for dinner.  Francesca came to join us and through a series of questioning I found, to my surprise and delight, that I had not completely made up everything that I wrote in my review of her show.  We all had a bite of a grasshopper taco.  I would rank it above lamb testicle pudding, above seahorse-on-a-stick, on par with walnut balls covered with ants, and slightly below haggis (at least the way Will made it).  A resounding endorsement, I know.

After dinner we had a couple of drinks at an Irish Pub.  It was beautifully decorated and I tried a Snakebite, which I had never had before but which is now up there among my favorite beer/cider-drinks.  There was a band which was playing every single song that literally everyone both knows and likes.  They went between things like Wonderwall, Walk Like an Egyptian, and Sweet Caroline (and that's just a small range of genres from the amazing set that they did- the singer had an excellent voice for almost every single cover, too).  Very good band and another successful trip to DC.  Going to try to take it easy for the weekend- do some light packing and cleaning.  It's going to be a very busy (and awesome) week next week, and I need to prepare.

Techno-hobo

I guess it was a matter of time and logical progressions in going from my standing desk to my sitting-on-the-floor desk.  

Clearly, my week of getting rid of EVERYTHING is going well.  I no longer have my epic desk.  I no longer have my comfy desk chair.  The loveseat is going bye-bye today and the couch will join it this weekend.  The good craigslist giveth and the good craigslist taketh away (but only when you want it to, hopefully).

I have found that I have a knack for assembling cardboard boxes into useful configurations in the meantime.  All those hours spent playing with legos were not spent in vain.

Last night I went into DC to see two shows at the Capital Fringe starring some very wonderful people from William and Mary.  Both shows, Shrewing of the Tamed and Crave, were excellent, though I have to give extra recognition to Francesca for both writing and starring in Shrewing of the Tamed.  She took the typical Taming of the Shrew story and subverted it in a very unexpected and subtle way that, after a day of reflection, strikes me as really brilliant.  The gist of it (as I understand it- I could be totally wrong as to what they were going for) is that she turned the play within the play into the less important aspect of the show (while usually the fact that it's a play within a play is entirely ignored and it's just treated as the play itself) and beefed up the characters who were actually performing the play.  Watching the characters fall in love with one another while acting as characters who were falling in love with one another for COMPLETELY DIFFERENT reasons (and understanding what was happening within that subtext) was absolutely amazing and a testament to the high level of acting from both CJ and Francesca.  The supporting actors kept the show fun and zany and allowed it to just be a comedy for anyone who didn't want to pay attention to what was going on behind the characters.

After the shows all of the WM people hung out for a while catching up and making new WM friends since there were at least twenty of us there.  CJ had the great misfortune of losing his car keys (and also spraining his ankle in the middle of the performance and not telling anyone) but that allowed me to hang out with CJ for a while as I drove him to his place to get his extra key.

In scary countdown news, it's ten days til I move out of this apartment forever and one month til I move in to my new one in DC.  I'm very very excited, but I have never enjoyed the process of moving.  I doubt anyone has.

I need to start having less fun on weekends.

To begin, I just want to make an announcement.  On Friday I beat Brian Paljug at minigolf by one glorious stroke.  It will never happen again, but I'm okay with that.  Later, I almost beat Brian (and many others) at poker.  I had the highest stack of chips around the time I started drinking this...

It's mead.  Chaucer's Mead, specifically.  

I'm wearing my Rebecca Black shirt because it was Friday, of course.

After a bottle of mead my poker playing abilities were, according to me, amazing.  Everything was going to plan until I thought I was so awesome I could bet on a hand without even looking at it.  I succeeded in bullying everyone else into folding except for Brian, who took his revenge on me for having beat him at minigolf.  After that things were a bit more even and we ended the game with everyone going all in on the final hand just because we were finished with cards.  I didn't win that one. 

On Saturday Brian, Josh and I went to go see Horrible Bosses in the afternoon.  My expectations were low and the movie vastly exceeded my expectations.  Good summer-movie fun.  Afterwards we had Indian food with Kayface and I started back for Sparks.

While driving down the highway someone behind me started honking at me and then pulled up next to me and was waving like he knew me.  On further inspection I saw that it was John McAfee, my friend from Woodberry and one-time housemate at William and Mary.  He called and we had a good chat before he hit his exit.  It made me wonder just how many people I pass on the highway who I actually know and would talk to if I recognized their cars.  I'm sure there's some sort of formula I could plug numbers into to figure that out.

Saturday evening Liza and I went to go see the final Harry Potter movie.  We had seen pretty much all the others together, so it was important to see this last one as well.  I thought it was good but not as good as the critics seem to want it to be.  The filmmakers didn't screw it up, sure, but that doesn't mean it was as amazing as it could have been.  

Sunday was another eventful day as I drove down to Baltimore to see my friends Will Bleser and Adam Cohen perform with their respective bands (Subangler and Audiostrobelight) at SONAR.  I had never seen Will perform in a band before, but his drumming remains the most amazingly complex and nuanced of any drummer that I have seen live.  I HAVE seen Adam perform before, and his shows are always amazing and energetic to a degree that it truly makes you feel as though you're in the presence of a performing legend.  They keep getting better and better.  As an added bonus there were a good number of William and Mary friends at the show.  Always good to catch up.

Time to get rid of all my stuff on craigslist!  

Technology Week

This was a very technology oriented week.  First off, I'm very excited about Google +.  Not for any of its social networking features, but for it's "hangout" feature.  And basically for one reason:

The hangout feature allows you to host a videochat with as many other people as you want, AND it gives you the capability to push a youtube video onto their screens.  Most old Twilight Zone episodes are on youtube.  You see where I'm going with this?  Twilight Zone Tuesday can live again- everyone can watch the same episode starting and ending at the same time all while seeing and hearing everyone else.  I think this should happen.

This coming week is going to be all about getting rid of my furniture, so I've started taking pictures and posting things to craigslist.  As useful as it is, I really hate the craigslist interface.  I spent way too much time on that.

Also, while Rachel was in town we ran every day and I got to how her my super-fun tracking system.  I realize, though, that if you are "friends" with me on my running tracker it would also be a really good way to stalk me.

The best thing that technology did for me this week, though, was help me get Rachel's voice onto some of the recordings for POWER.  This means I no longer have to listen to myself try and sing soprano while trying to make notes on songs for the next draft, which is a great relief.  

Not Old.

For some reason all the 24-year-old people I know (including me) have decided at some point this year to make it known that  either now or sometime soon they would consider themselves "old." At this announcement, everyone around has to scoff and say "you aren't old at all!"  

"Our friends are getting married.  We're so old."

"We're taking appetizers to a party.  We're old."

"My ex-girlfriend has a child who is old enough to say my name.  I'm old."

etc...

Well, after a rejuvenating week at the beach I came back to my apartment to find this in my mail:

I win.  But in the most losing way possible.

Hemmingway at the Beach

I had never before read Hemmingway.  That day I read Hemmingway.  I was at the beach.  The waves crashed.  The sky was blue with white clouds.  I did not know what to make of the prose.  Because it was terse.  Because it was terse and repetitive.  Because it was terse and repetitive and the wind blew the pages making it difficult to read.  But then, but then, I stopped seeing the sentences and the book made some sense and it was nice and I stopped noticing the run-on sentences.  It was very nice to read it then. And my sister said "you like the book." And I said "yes I like the book." 

I heard the thunder in the distance.  It was time to go.  Later we grilled chicken breasts and I made a very nice marinade and they were very good.  It had been a nice week at the beach.

Pictures Would Help

I was doing well for a while when it came to taking pictures to put on this blog, but lately I have... not.  Pictures exist of these events, I just do not have them.

This past Saturday I picked up Beau at Dulles airport and we then spent the day in Baltimore.  We had a late lunch at that same Afghan Kabob place I went to with Tyler about a month ago, and yet this time the chickpeas seemed somewhat less magical than before.  Then we went to the National Aquarium and looked at fish in tanks for the entire afternoon.  Worth doing once, but in the end they still were just a lot of fish in tanks.  Beau also bought a kindle while we were downtown, and then we went to dinner with Liza at a sushi place. 

On Sunday Beau and I headed into DC for a Third of July party hosted by my first roommate ever, C'pher.  There were about seven other guys from our Woodberry class who showed up and we had a good time reminiscing.  We even took a picture to be (supposedly) sent to the Wofo magazine.  There was a vote as to how the picture should be composed, and the standard all-of-us-standing-with-one-another won out over all-of-us-helping-one-of-us-do-a-kegstand.  I feel like we have better odds of making it into the magazine now.  The edible highlight of the party was C'pher's award winning (third place in a Washington Post contest) sauce which was generously ladled onto every serving of brisket and burger.

The next morning we headed down to the beach, which is where I am now typing this from the shielded confines of the beach house as I have quarantined myself for sunburn-repair.  Brian and Kay arrived in the evening and the four of us participated in our now traditional first-night-of-the-beach-grilling session.  It was, as always, an enormous success... though we did note with some small measure of sadness that part of the fun had always been how much we sucked at actually getting everything prepared and cooked, and yet this year we were downright efficient and professional about it.  Clearly we need to find something to increase the challenge for next year. Later that night we went down to the beach to enjoy the amateur firework shows.  Drunk people lighting explosives five feet away from you is always a fun and safe way to celebrate the birth of our nation.

We spent the next day at the beach, and I alternated between reading The Historian, an intriguing book about Dracula which Kayface lent me, The Big Short, an analysis of the 2008 financial meltdown which Beau lent me, and The Time Machine, an H.G. Wells classic which I hadn't yet read but which I managed to work through whenever Beau left his kindle unattended.  At this point I have finished both The Big Short and The Time Machine, both of which were excellent for completely different reasons.

The four of us went out for seafood Tuesday night and then went to play minigolf.  I always forget, until the moments just before we start playing, that Brian used to be on some sort of minigolf-playing-team and that his brother was at one point the top ranked minigolf player in Virginia, or something like that.  Playing minigolf with Brian, then, is more about saving face than it is ever about winning, which you simply can't do.  As predicted, Brian destroyed us all and was up by something like eight strokes over whoever was in second place (which obviously wasn't me and so is not worth remembering). 

Yesterday Brian and Kay took off back to Philly (it's an understandably busy month for them) and my dad and sister showed up around two.  We have continued... you know, just doing the beach thing, which is great.  After this week I have convinced Rachel to come back up to Baltimore with me in order to help me out with some recording things.  In return I've agreed to help her out with a few songs that she needs to learn for auditions when she starts college in August. 

For the rest of the day, if you need to find me, I'll likely be on the deck on the roof reading.  I will not have my phone, for this is the beach- and such is the tradition.

Achievement Unlocked: Tesla Musical

I've been silent this week because I was back on Moonbase Alpha.  As of right now I have officially completed the first draft of all the music for the increasingly-less-top-secret-project, POWER.  Does this mean that I have no more music to write?  Not at all.  But it does mean that, at least for the current version of the script, there is music that goes along with all of the lyrics.

Upon completing the music I was rewarded with the greatest gift that I have ever received as a musical writer: I popped in a blank CD and told my computer to burn all of the music, and it gave me an error message.  The message?  I forget the exact wording, but the paraphrased version sounds something like:

UNABLE TO BURN DISC.  TOO MUCH MUSIC.  WILL NOT FIT.

So I'm not sure what I win, but I totally won.  After editing some things down I should end up with around eighty minutes of music total, which is MORE than double the amount of music that I wrote for The Fall of the House of Usher.  I am pleased.  Very pleased.  The whole show comes to about two hours and fifteen minutes with a ten minute intermission right now.

I don't remember whether I've given a rundown of what POWER is about on this blog and I don't care to go back and look so I'll just do that right now.

POWER (working title, not finalized) is the surprisingly true rock(ish) musical (not to be confused with a rock opera) based on the epic life of Dr. Nikola Tesla.  A genius who immigrated to America for the chance to build a better way of producing energy, he worked (and then fought) with Thomas Edison and JP Morgan, befriended George Westinghouse and Mark Twain, raised money from Astor and Vanderbilt, and ended up creating a slew of inventions which still baffle scientists today.  X-rays, AC power, florescent light, the radio, wireless energy transfer, Tesla  coils, ball lightning, remote controlled drones, death-rays, an earthquake generator.... Tesla kept himself busy.  Our story focuses mostly on his conflicts with Edison and Morgan and ends with the destruction of Tesla's secret facility at Wardenclyffe (which some thought to be a prototype for a free wireless energy system and others imagined to be a weapon, and which he only got funding for by saying it was going to be for wireless telephony).    

Mostly, though, the story is about the ability of one man to dream, invent, inspire, and rock out while doing so.  At some point down the line there will be a performance of POWER, and I hope that it will be as enjoyable to see as it has been to write. 

The next stage involves rewriting all the music and getting good recordings of it with people who can actually sing the parts (I have done enough crappy falsetto singing in the past week to last a lifetime).