Author: Jon
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Our local Jedi
It was inevitable, I guess: Bend has its local Star Wars superfans who dressed up in costumes and lined up outside the theater for the premier of “Revenge of the Sith” last night. I know this not because I was there, but because Z21‘s Christian Boris (one of the weather guys) did a live broadcast from the theater to cover the event. However, Christian did more than just cover the event…
He was dressed up as Darth Vader.
Thus began the funniest, most surreal Z21 broadcast I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever. And it was such a short clip! First there was the shock and awe of the Darth Vader costume… on the guy reporting the news… whose helmet looked too small… I honestly couldn’t tell if he was dressed up because he was doing a piece for the news, or if he’s really into Star Wars. Either way, it was gutsy, but just seemed so, so wrong.
And, when you think it really couldn’t get any better—aside from just showing some of the various costumes people put together for the big night—Christian wisely decided not to interview any particular people and opted instead to just let the camera do the talking.
To my utter amazement, these two guys dressed up as Jedi start lightsaber dueling in the parking lot. I mean, full-on theatrics, and the taller guy with the more elaborate costume was really, really into it—leaping in the air, spinning around, the works. It was a bonafide jaw-dropping moment… followed by laughing uncontrollably and utter disbelief.
Back in the studio, both Nina Mehlhaf and Jason Carr were laughing, too… I got the sense that Nina was this close from losing it and descending into maniacal laughter, but she reigned it in in time.
You know what’s even better? When the moment was selected for the Bulletin‘s photo of the day:
Photo courtesy of The Bulletin -
Remembering Mt. St. Helens
Before 
After Today is the 25th anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens. How many of you reading are old enough to remember that day? Or were even born yet?
I was in first grade, attending Alfalfa School. The main thing I remember from that time was the ash—it didn’t drift quite as far south as us, but it did make it to Redmond. My teacher was from Redmond (Alfalfa was—and still is—in the Redmond school district), and her car had a fine layer of ash all over it. That doesn’t seem like much—the cities and towns closer to the eruption had day turn into night from all the ash, so much that it looked like deep snowdrifts and blizzard conditions, people had to wear masks and cars actually stalled out and had their engines ruined from intaking the stuff—but to a seven-year-old even that light dusting really drove home the reality of having a live, active volcano in the relative neighborhood.
And in the days and weeks that followed, the news would show that time-lapse footage of the entire north face of St. Helens exploding and disappearing, followed by the unimaginable image of acre after acre of mud and felled trees and grey wasteland. Even to this day it’s mind-boggling at just how violent that event was.
Jack over at The Grumpy Forester has an amazing recollection of the eruption, and Wikipedia, as usual, has a terrific article on it.
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blogdrama
There’s a new Bend blog in town: Bend Reality Check, but I don’t know how long it will last. I say this because the tagline is, “Mission: to maintain some sort of reality for those who think they are the most important people in Bend, Oregon” and it appears to have been launched primarily to get back at Shannon and Simone for blogging their bad experience at Kanpai. As such it’s full of snarky comments about the two of them.
That’s too bad, because this sounds like it could be a good insider’s blog about the restaurants in Bend:
I am an culinary hermit that lives in the shadows of Bend, Oregon. In a former life I was a culinary mercinary in this town, with 14 years of food slinging under my belt. Titles were bestowed upon me, such as: restaurant manager, production chef, lead saute chef, kitchen manger, etc, but I renouced my titles to walk the earth, like Caine in Kung Fu, only unsheathing my food mojo for special people and occasions.
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Going mainstream
Should it bother me that the National Security Agency has a website? Or even stranger, that it has a special website just for kids?I mean, we’re talking about a government agency that was once so secretive that “NSA” was supposed to stand for “No Such Agency.” Weird.
Hmmmm… even weirder, I just noticed that the NSA website is running—of all things—Cold Fusion, and according to Netcraft, it’s actually sitting on Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0. What the hell? One of the premier spook agencies of the United States and they’re running Cold Fusion on Windows???
To further enhance the cognitive dissonance experience, check out question number 16 from the FAQ:
I’ve seen NSA/CSS in movies and on TV. Do you assassinate people? Do you secretly perform experiments on us?
Because we work with highly sensitive information, we are frequently the subject of speculation – and highly imaginative and creative fictitious pieces in the media. However, it is important to distinguish fact from fiction. The fact is that the Executive Order 12333 (EO 12333) strictly prohibits any intelligence agency from conducting these unethical activities, and we strictly abide by that Order.
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The Years of Rice and Salt
Over the weekend I finished reading The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Fantastic book, albeit one that defied my expectations, and I thought I’d write a short review.
I picked this book up because I loved the concept: an alternate history novel that explores the question, what if the Black Death of the 14th century wiped out 99% of Europe? The world becomes dominated by Islam and Buddhism, the Chinese discover America, Christianity is a footnote in history.
It’s divided into ten Books (basically chapters), each of which covers a later time and place as the alternate history unfolds. The breadth and scope of this project is surprising and mind-boggling; Robinson has gone to an obsessive level of thought and detail in constructing this history, and it’s entirely believable. The amount of research must have been enormous.
It surprised me on several levels; the main one was the storytelling technique Robinson used in tying each story in the ten Books together to provide a sense of continuity while keeping each distinct. I won’t go into detail here—the Amazon reviews do, and I think that spoils it a bit—and while I had my doubts, it ultimately works.
This isn’t science fiction in the die-hard sense, though (insomuch as alternate history tends to get classified as science fiction because nobody really knows how else to classify it). It’s much more a meditation on sociology, religion, history, politics, etc., on a world-wide scale. Very different than what I thought it would be. Yet very good. I totally recommend it.
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Treknobabble on Slashdot
In the science fiction world, “technobabble” refers to the use of technical or scientific jargon strung together so that to listeners unfamiliar with the language, it sounds like made-up nonsense. When relating to Star Trek, a derivative and more derogatory concept shows up: “treknobabble,” which, in the words of Wikipedia, “is used humorously by fans of the various Star Trek television series, and disparagingly by its critics, to describe the infamous amount of pseudoscientific gibberish inserted seemingly at random into many episodes of these television series.”
Well, on Slashdot tonight this article contains the most ridiculous real-world treknobabble I’ve ever seen:
A one-dimensional [Bose-Einstein condensation] in an optical lattice is rapidly rotated, causing a quantized vortex to form. The bosonic part of the superstring consists of this vortex line. Inside the vortex, they would trap an ultracold cloud of fermionic atoms. Hopefully this will allow observation of the supersymmetry between bosons and fermions, thus providing the first experimental evidence to support superstring theory.
That makes no sense to me whatsoever, and yet it’s the funniest thing I’ve read all day.
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Friday the 13th
You gotta love superstition. It’s widely considered to be the unluckiest day of the year today, but does anyone really know why? Wikipedia has a good article, and Snopes debunks most of the myths. The conclusions? Nobody knows for sure.
I’ve always rather liked Friday the 13th. I don’t believe there’s anything inherently lucky about it—good or bad—any more than any other day. Although today I walked downtown to get my haircut and got caught in the rain walking back—without a jacket. Bad luck? You decide.
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Stranded on a desert isle…
I guess this post spins out of watching the TV show “Lost” and a post by Isaac Laquedem a while back. The question is, what three books would you take with you if you were stranded on a desert isle? (Isaac’s post considers five books; do that if you can’t keep yourself to three.)
My tentative picks would be:
- Les Miserables. No, not in the original French; I like my massive English paperback edition. I haven’t even finished this book, so it would occupy me for a while.
- Either The Stand or Cryptonomicon.
- Probably an anthology of some sort. Something like The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, or maybe The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.
Of course, if I were practical, I’d choose an all-purpose survival guide, a book on identifying plants (edible and poisonous), that sort of thing.
Or, better yet, go with this book:
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Things about Bend that I don’t like
So, continuing in my “Things I X about Bend” series:
I don’t like…
- …the traffic; the disproportionate amount of congestion and the bad drivers.
- …not having a mass transit system.
- …how the north end of town is a stripmall/boxstore eyesore.
- …skyrocketing real estate prices.
- …the roundabouts. Actually, I’m kind of on the fence about them; they’re not inherently bad but do we really need so many of them?
- …overpriced “public” art. Like the “gateway to Bend” thing on the parkway made from rusty scrap metal.
What else?
See also: Things about Bend that I miss, Things about Bend that I like.