Another alias; or, the desperation of AAA

My credit report is full of "aliases" that I have never gone by, but are the result of confused corporate entities in search of new customers.  This will be a new one when TransExperFax do their next refresh...

Operation Shutdown

(extracted from the Art for Dummies description of "the Raft of the Medusa")

the most compelling
       remarkable work
    gazed for hour after hour
looted from public opinion

the contemporary tragedy
    hints
of mutiny and cannibalism
when one
          survivor
waves frantically at the far, far distance

This is actually from months and months ago, but I'm just getting around to posting it now.  We did an exercise at a PTO meeting where we created a poem by extracting words from a randomly selected page of a book.  Mine was about the spectacle of the possibility of the federal government shutting down.  It seemed particularly appropriate, given the source material.

Wait a minute, it'll change

Two days ago, weather forecast was sun, sun, sun, so we bought tickets for the July 4 VSO concert at Shelburne Farms.  This afternoon, the forecast went to 50/50 possible rain in the evening.  At 5:30pm, the gates opened for picnicking before the concert.  6pm, the skies opened, thunder and lightning, torrential downpour.  6:30pm, concert canceled.  7pm, rain stopped, sun out.  7:30pm, drizzling lightly.

Sigh.

My William Sadler / Robert Patrick confusion

...or, Why I'm Once Again Thankful to Live in the Age of the Internet.

When Terminator 2 was released, I remember being told that the actor who played the T-1000 had been in Die Harder.  Naturally, I took this to mean that the T-1000 was the same actor as the colonel whathisname doing naked calisthenics in his hotel room, and not some redshirt who is offed early on in the luggage sorting room (or wherever the hell that scene is set in the airport; I'm not rewatching any of the Die Hard sequels; one way or another, he's gone in the first 20 seconds of that clip)**.  They didn't really look alike, but this was back in the dark ages, before I could look this up on the IMDB or compare movie clips on YouTube.

Anyway, this is why, when we rewatched Iron Man 3 the other night, I said, "Hey, it's President Robert Patrick!" before realizing a minute later, "Aw crap, no, that's... that's William Sadler.  We loved him in Wonderfalls."  I don't have this problem with movies made in the last 20 years.


** This was an entirely reasonable assumption, IMO.  If someone had told you that same summer that the main villain in the upcoming Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves movie had been in Die Hard, you would have assumed (correctly) it was the actor who played Hans Gruber, not Heinrich.

Water shaming in CA

You can now look up which urban water districts are using the most residential water, courtesy of the LA Times (thanks FlowingData for the link).  

It just so happens that I have data on our monthly water bills for the last 14 years; our utility reports in terms of cubic feet, so our average of ~11 cubic feet per day for a 4-person family is ~20 gallons per person per day, compared to the average of 83 gallons per person per day for California.

I will offer my usual complaint that while averages are informative, I would really like to see distributions of water usage by district.  LA Times, show us some side-by-side boxplots so that we can see whether the average is due to a generally high usage in the population, or whether that average is pulled up by a few citizens with their own private Sea Worlds.