fauxklore

I’d made plans for this past weekend back in February. Luka Bloom, an Irish folk singer I’ve wanted to see perform for a long time, was going to be performing in London. You are probably unfamiliar with his name, but you may know of his brother, Christy Moore, who is a big name in Irish music. Anyway, I discussed this with the gentleman with whom I am conducting the world’s longest running brief meaningless fling (who lives in London) and we made plans that included that concert and an excursion to Winchester. By the way, this is an example of his indulging me in my interests since he doesn’t like folk music.

Alas, the universe conspired against me and the concert got cancelled. On the plus side that meant that I could go to another event I wanted to. Namely, RhinoStock, a celebration of the life of the late Clint Weathers, aka ZenRhino (or just Rhino). I flew to Denver on Thursday afternoon and, after picking up my rental car (a Chevy Bolt - see rant below), spent the night at a hotel near the airport.

I had a few options for things I could do on Friday and decided that the best choice was to go to Louisville (a little south of Boulder) and do a Volksmarch for the first time in about 7 years. The weather was very nice for walking. Louisville has a cute enough downtown, but the route between the walk start / finish point (a recreation / senior center) and downtown was pretty much bland suburbia. Still, it was good to stretch my legs and there were some interesting bird sounds that I was unable to identify. After my walk, I had Thai food for lunch (reasonably good drunken noodles with tofu), then headed to my hotel where I took a long nap.

I’d had a vague intention of having supper at an interesting looking place across the parking lot from my hotel (the Courtyard Boulder Broomfield, which is in neither Boulder nor Broomfield). A combination of barbecue and Indian food - what could be wrong with that? Well, what was wrong was that they had a water problem and were closed! I ended up just grabbing a sandwich nearby. (For anyone who didn’t know, tunafish sandwiches are one of the key components of what I consider Purina Miriam Chow.)

RhinoStock didn’t start until early afternoon, so I drove over to downtown Boulder and had breakfast at The Walnut Cafe. It used to be one of my go-to breakfast places in Boulder. A lot of my friends favor Le Peep, but I’d eaten there somewhat more recently, so I figured I might as well go to a place I hadn’t been to in 20-odd years. I’m pleased to report that the food is as good as ever, with a particularly excellent Mexican omelet. And blueberry corn bread. (The latter is another essential component of Purina Miriam Chow.)

I was well behaved and did not go into McGuckin’s, the hardware store of the gods. (Seriously, this is the best hardware store I have ever been in anywhere in the world. I love it even more than I love McLean Hardware, which is my best local option.)

Eventually, I meandered over to RhinoStock central, namely the home of our hosts, Geo and Momerath. I suspect it is boring to read about a party if you weren’t there and don’t know the people who were, so I’m not going to give a lot of details. Let’s just say that there was lots of wide ranging conversation, lots of catching up with people I hadn’t seen in ages, and lots of reminiscing about events from decades ago.

At some point there was a zoom hook up so several people who weren’t able to be there in person could share their memories of Rhino. I should probably explain that most of us knew him (and each other) from a MUSH called Tiny TIM. If anyone cares, my name on there was cypria (Or is? I haven’t logged in for years and I don’t have a working MUD client). Some of the people there have been friends since the usenet days and some things that happened at soc.singles parties of the late 1980’s got mentioned. If you know, you know.

There was also a sing-along of “The Weight” by The Band. And toasts with various alcohol options available. I am smart enough not to become a party victim.

I didn’t stay super late since I had a crazy early flight on Sunday morning. I managed to get barely enough sleep to be able to drive back to the airport. After a decadent breakfast (pancake flight!) at Snooze on the mezzanine level of Terminal B, I collapsed onto the plane and mostly slept my way to IAD. As exhausted as I was, it was definitely worth the trip.

The Chevy Bolt - A Rant: I did not want to rent an electric car. However, Payless Car Rental insisted that the only other options were a minivan or an SUV, which were even worse.

There are two significant problems with electric vehicles as rentals. The first one is that I have yet to see one which is not an ergonomic nightmare. For example, I never succeeded in opening the trunk. I googled how to do this and, given the number of hits that turned up, this appears to be a common problem. As another example, given that everything else is done off of a large screen, why is the seat adjustment manual? What I find particularly egregious is how many steps it takes to adjust anything, e.g. the climate settings. In my opinion, sliders or dials are really a much more intuitive way to adjust the temperature and airflow. It also took way too many steps to pull up the radio and I never succeeded in finding the volume controls. (Which are another thing for which sliders or dials are more intuitive, by the way.) And then there is the nightmare of the voice announcing when you are exceeding the speed limit. Except it was usually wrong. If there is a speed limit sign reading 65 right next to me and I am driving 63, I am NOT exceeding the speed limit you bloody idiot.

Of course, there are also many gas-powered cars with sucky ergonomics, too. So what is specifically wrong with an electric car? As far as I can tell, there are roughly 347 different companies running public charging stations for electric cars. And every single one of them has its own app they want you to download. And, if you are driving far enough to need to recharge the car, you may not have a lot of choice in which charger company you are at the mercy of. I don’t know about you, but I need less than one gallon of gas to add 25 miles of range to Twain, my beloved little gas-powered econobox. That takes maybe 2 minutes? (And, of course, I fill the gas tank completely, so I spend maybe 15 minutes buying gas and have a range of over 300 miles.) It takes an hour to charge a typical electric car enough to add 25 miles of range. Yes, there are fast chargers, but only a limited number of them and most of those are for Teslas and only usable by other cars with an adapter that rental car companies don’t necessarily give you. Frankly, I don’t have four or more hours to waste when I am out of town for a couple of days.

In short, an electric car only makes sense if you have a dedicated place to charge it. (Which is also why they don’t work for me as a condo dweller.) But they damn well don’t make sense as rental cars.

I had a fairly busy weekend and am anticipating a busy week.


Dear Evan Hansen: I went to see Dear Evan Hansen at the Kennedy Center on Friday night. While it originated at Arena Stage in D.C., I never managed to see it during its original run. The plot involves a teenage boy who writes letters to himself as part of a therapy assignment. Another boy takes one of these letters off the printer at the computer lab in school – and then commits suicide. Finding the letter, that boy’s parents believe that he and Evan were great friends. Evan doesn’t want to break their hearts, so he goes along with this – and the lie takes over, complete with social media campaign.

The music and lyrics are by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who were also responsible for La La Land and The Greatest Showman, both of which I disliked. And, frankly, I found the music here eminently forgettable. In short, the songs pretty much all sound alike. There’s next to no choreography, either. One has to wonder why this is a musical at all. And, frankly, with so much of the story depending on social media, I can’t imagine this having all that long of a life. The emotions will still be relevant in 20 years, but will anybody care about the mechanisms for both hiding and expressing them?

The plus side is in the performances. Ben Levi Ross was excellent in the title role and Maggie McKenna as Zoe (the sister of the dead boy and Evan’s long-running crush) balanced him nicely. There was fine comic relief from Jared Goldsmith as Jared and Phoebe Koyabe as Alana. One just wishes they had less obvious material to work with.


Assassins: On Sunday, I saw Assassins at Signature Theatre. I’ve seen this show before and listened to the original cast album dozens of times, but it is always worth seeing a Sondheim show at Signature, which has made something of a specialty of his work. (In fact, the program points out that this is their 30th Sondheim musical.) So the point of going was to see how they handled this brilliant but difficult work.

Short answer – they handled it very well. Sam Ludwig was a little folksier than I’d have preferred as the Balladeer, perhaps, but not annoyingly so. Lawrence Redmond made a sympathetic Leon Czolgosz, particularly in the bar scene as he explains why it matters that someone breaks a bottle. Evan Casey was surprisingly tender as John Hinckley. Bobby Smith (a local favorite) completely captured the craziness of Charles Guiteau, notably in "The Ballad of Guiteau." Christopher Bloch was very funny as Sam Byck. And then there were Rachel Zampelli as Squeaky Fromme and Tracy Lynn Olvera as Sara Jane Moore, both of whom gave wonderful performances. I should note that Moore’s story is probably the least accurate in the show. (For one thing, Fromme and Moore’s assassination attempts were a couple of weeks apart. For another, Moore’s failed because of a faulty sight on her gun and her arm being deflected on her second shot attempt, not because she didn’t know how to shoot a gun. Nor did she bring along her dog and son. But that’s not as funny.)

Overall, this is still Sondheim at his most brilliant and most disturbing.


Meet Twain: The really big news of the weekend was that I replaced Neptune, my dearly beloved 1994 Saturn SL2. My new car is a white 2019 Hyundai Accent, which I have named Twain (as in Accent Mark.) It’s nice to have a car where the air conditioning works and the ceiling fabric is not tearing and falling down.

Many of my friends are in shock. One colleague (on the West Coast) referred to this as "big news from coast to coast" and said it is a good omen for our purchase of additional satellites.

I am hoping this will be my last car purchase ever.

Celebrity Death Watch: Merle Haggard was a country singer. Rachel Johnson was the last native of St. Kilda.

Car Annoyance #1: Neptune has now had two incidents of running a bit roughly and rattling, followed by the engine coolant temperature light flashing on and off a few times, after which everything sounds fine. The annoying part is that the mechanic couldn’t reproduce this behavior so can’t fix it. Oh, well, I suppose you’re entitled to a few rattles at that age. (22 car years is about 140 human years, right?)

Car Annoyance #2: I made the service appointment on-line and got a confirmation email. But, when I got to the mechanic, they had no record of the appointment and told me, "oh, the on-line system hasn’t sent us an update in over two months." And exactly how was I supposed to know that? On top of which, they didn’t have the right person there to do one of the things I brought Neptune in for, so I need to make another appointment for the wheel alignment.

Another Internet Annoyance: I had a discount code for some theatre tickets and finally found a date that would work with the friend who wanted to come along. It took me way too many attempts to find the little checkbox that would activate the discount code and let me buy tickets at the relevant price. And, of course, the annoying Ticketmaster service fees and "convenience fee" add 25% or so to the ticket price.

Household Annoyance: I believe the papers in my house are multiplying when I am not looking. Can one of my neighbors check out any mysterious rustling sounds when I’m not home?

Credit Card Annoyance: Yet another fraud incident, leading to having to get a card replaced. It seems this happens at least every few years. I have a faint suspicion that this may be linked to having used the card in question at a restaurant. At least it isn’t one that I have recurring payments linked to.

A Minor Work Annoyance: It is actually possible to send out a meeting announcement more than an hour before the meeting. It is even possible to send out a meeting announcement before the day of the meeting.

Baseball Annoyance: Not only have the Nationals added yet another racing president, it’s Hoover.

Working my way through my mother's books, right now I am reading Stephen King's Christine which is, of course, about a malevolent car. That may not be a good thing to do.

First, the guy who has the cubicle across the aisle from mine totaled his car, then got rear ended a few days later (in his rental) while at a stoplight.

Then I got an email from our condo management office about several cars having been vandalized in the garage, with hubcaps and airbags stolen.

Last night, I went to pick up my dry cleaning. I tend to clean frost off my windows by the "roll them down, then back up" method. The right rear window wouldn't roll down at all. The right front window did roll down - but then refused to roll back up. (These are, by the way, electronic window controls. My car is ancient, but not ancient enough to have a handle you turn.)

Fortunately, it was just misty and not actually raining. So I ran my errands (dry cleaner and supermarket) with the window open. Neither errand took long and the only stuff inside the car was worthless (e.g. a box of tissues and road map book). But it was still annoying. Fortunately, when I got home, I was able to shake the window loose a bit and, eventually, get it roll up again.

This had happened once before some years ago, so I am hoping it is just another isolated incident. And the timing was not as bad as it might have been. To be fair, most of the time Neptune is anything but malevolent as cars go. But I think Christine may be a bad influence on the cars around me.

I think I need to warn parents of teens not to read Carrie.

I really didn't intend to go so long without posting here, but life has been hectic.

Celebrity Death Watch: My notes on who to mention go back to Harry Morgan, who had a truly distinctive, immediately recognizable voice. I watched M*A*S*H regularly as a teenager and remember being sad when Col Potter's plane disappeared on his way home.

The literary world offered up the losses of essayist Christopher Hitchens and of Russell Hoban, who wrote some children's books but who I associate primarily with Riddley Walker. The political world has one sad death (Vaclav Havel, bridging the literary world) and one less sad one (Kim Il Jung). The more obscure deaths are those of Jerry Robinson, who created The Joker, and of Erica Wilson, who wrote needlework patterns.

The death I most want to highlight, however, is Cesaria Evora. The "barefoot diva" of Cape Verde had a phenomenal voice and brought a lot of attention to the traditional music of that nation. She was certainly one of the reasons I want to go there. (There are others - Cape Verdeans played a major role in the whaling industry and, hence, New England.) I'm sorry I never got to see her perform live.

Three Sighs for Transportation: I came home from an errand to discover that the right front tire of my car was flat. I'd gotten new tires in April and, thanks to the warranty, that meant getting it fixed at Sears would be nearly free. They told me it would be "an hour and a half to two hours." I came back after two hours (having had breakfast and picked up a couple of things at the adjacent mall) and they hadn't even started on it. In the end, I was there four and a half hours. Sigh.

I've also had a few occasions recently to take the red line of the metro. Single tracking before 9 p.m. on a weekday is annoying. I thought the argument for the weekend shutdowns they've been doing is that they would then not have to single track to do repairs. Sigh.

I also had a frustrating Amtrak trip to New York, with power problems that made the train about an hour late. The delay was not as annoying as the fact that there were no lights while they were doing repairs (at Baltimore). Sigh.

Work: The project that will never end hasn't.

New York: My trip to New York at the beginning of the month was for my 35th high school reunion. The gathering was small but it was good to see the people who were there. I also used the time to do two Volksmarch events in New York City. The midtown walk was, in general, predictable but pleasant enough. The Chelsea / Greenwich Village walk was more interesting, particularly as I had never actually been on the High Line before. It's a good thing I was time constrained as the route passed the Strand Bookstore, which is always potentially dangerous to my budget.

Theatre: I can't go to New York and not go to the theatre. So I saw The Book of Mormon on Broadway. It was lively and funny, albeit a bit crude. It did push some of my buttons about how Africa is portrayed in pop culture, but that is to be expected. I'll also suggest that it is a very bad idea to take a child under about age 15 to see this. But I highly recommend it for thick-skinned adults. (If you liked, say, "Avenue Q," you will enjoy this.)

On a related note, I saw Cannibal: The Musical at Landless Theatre. (It is related via Trey Parker, who also co-created South Park.) There is some lively music and some funny moments (particularly involving the encounter with the Indians) but it was a bit overdone. It turns out, by the way, that Parker got his history mostly correct, but I was still disappointed not to hear a reference to Alferd Packer having eaten the Democratic majority of Summit County.

On a very unrelated note, I saw Billy Elliot at the Kennedy Center on Friday night. As I said on Facebook, it was a good 2 hour musical but is, unfortunately, 3 hours. There is somewhat too much talk for the amount of music. And most of the music is unremarkable. I do think "Solidarity" is powerful and effective and both "Deep Into the Ground" and "He Could Go and He Could Shine" are well done. The piece I hated was "Angry Dance," largely because the volume was so high that my ears were actually ringing through the intermission. The dancing (by Kylend Hetherington the night I saw it) was notable, particularly in the dream sequence when Billy dances to Swan Lake with his older self. But the real show-stopper was Cynthia Darrow as Grandma, an earthy woman indeed.

Finally, I saw Hairspray at Signature Theatre yesterday. I had seen this on Broadway some years ago and wondered how it would be in this much smaller space. The answer is that Signature did their usual excellent job. The songs are catchy, the book is reasonably funny, and the performers looked like they were having fun. So was I.

MAD: There was a talk by Al Jaffee and Mary-Lou Weisman (who wrote a recent biography of him) at the DCJCC on Thursday night. His life was definitely not what one might have expected, having been brought from the U.S. back to her Lithuanian shtetl by his mother when he was 6 and living there until he was rescued by his father six years later. The High School of Music and Arts changed his life - and MAD Magazine made him famous. At age 90, he still writes "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" and does the fold-ins. I feel privileged to have been able to enjoy s much of his work.

I've got a list of things to do the length of my arm and writing about some of these things will help me cross off part of it.

Baseball: It ain't over till it's over. It ain't over till it's over. It ain't over till it's over. If I say it enough times, maybe I'll believe it.

Fashion: The latest L.L. Bean catalog offers a cashmere hoodie. This is just wrong.

Cars: I read a description of the Fisker Karma hybrid luxury sedan. The detail that I consider over the top is that the wood trim is claimed to be made exclusively from "trees that died from natural causes."

More products that make no sense:There is something being marketed called Devotion Vodka. Its claim to fame is that it contains protein powder. Does anyone actually believe this makes it healthier? I'll stick to a good rum, personally.

Defunct product that made no sense: While cleaning out a recipe folder, I found a "Ragu Rewards" brochure from 2000. One product offered (for just 10 UPCs plus $3.95 postage and handling) was a "children's mess kit." This included one sectioned plate, 4 tumblers, 3 bowls, 3 snack cups, lids, plus a fork and spoon, all in a drawstring travel bag. Exactly how many children was this intended to be used for?

Signs, signs, everywhere a sign:A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post had a story about the Typo Eradication Advancement League. This appears to be a two-man operation, devoted to correcting spelling and grammar on signs. The odd part is that the story was in the travel section. Anyway, these guys are doing a good thing and it seems they have a book and a web site.

Customer service: It does not give me great confidence in a telephone company when two out of three calls to their customer service department get disconnected in the middle. It took some doing, since the person who was supposed to reschedule an appointment just canceled it instead. He also gave me a ticket number that was completely useless, as it can't be used to look up the status of a repair or even to talk to another customer service person. But I did finally get a technician out here. I have functioning phone service again! And, even better, I no longer have an intermittent hum on the line. It seems that the technician who installed my FIOS back when I moved here (nearly 3 years ago) never disconnected the copper wire.

Travel There is a company doing zeppelin tours in California. I have definitely got to do this.

I still need to take photos of last weekend's creations, which means that I need to clear off some space to use as a backdrop for said photos. So I will just stay behind on that and write about theatre going instead.

Today's expedition was to Signature Theatre to see Giant, the world premiere of Michael John LaChiusa's musical adaptation of the Edna Ferber novel. I have to admit that I've neither read the novel nor seen the film adaptation of it, so I had nothing to compare it to. In fact, my only real familiarity with the novel is its frequent appearance in crossword puzzles.

That unfamiliarity is both an advantage and a disadvantage. There were several aspects of the story which seemed insufficiently resolved to me - but I can assume that is a problem with the source material, not the adaptation. Was it Ferber who wrote a novel without making up her mind whether it was about people, tradition, bigotry or all three? Or was Sybille Pearson (who wrote the book for the musical) reluctant to choose one interpretation?

That sounds more negative than I intend it to. I thought that, overall, the show was worth seeing and, surprisingly, did not feel in need of editing despite running for nearly 4 hours (with two intermissions). The first act establishes the fundamental problem of Leslie's search for belonging in Texas. The second act stretches that to Bick's difficulty in adjusting to the changes in Texas, while the third takes on both the next generation and newer conflicts. The question of how to deal with political differences within relationships is always an interesting one and kept my interest as Leslie (and, later, Jordy) try to make Bick change his prejudices.

As for the music, I thought it was, in general, effective at setting mood and revealing character. Jett gets the best songs (as a villain should), though "When to Bluff" may be just a bit too creepy. ("The Dog is Gonna Bark" is creepier, but more forgivably so since it reveals Jett as a McCarthyite.) I also thought that the reprise of "Aurelia Dolores" made a strong lead-in to the finale, particularly because of the translation of the lyrics into English.

Betsy Morgan did a very good job as Leslie and Lewis Cleale was competent as Bick. But the two performances I want to make particular note of are Ashley Robninson's as Jett and John Dossett as Bawley.

Overall, I thought this was worth seeing and I think it could transfer to Broadway successfully.

On an only mildly related subject, the oil light on my car came on when I pulled into the parking lot on the way to the show. I stopped at the service station a couple of blocks away after the show and added oil, but it looks like taking my car in for service has to go on the to-do list for the week. Sigh.

I will not get the pleasure of seeing my car's odometer reach 100,000 miles. No, there is no accident or catastrophic breakdown involved. Instead, it's the stupidity of federal law.

Here's the background:

1) I don't drive a lot. I live across the street from a metro station and work a couple of blocks from a metro station and I'd rather spend my commute time sitting on a train reading a novel than stuck in traffic. In L.A. I drove about 8000 miles a year. Here it is more like 2500.

2) I do, however, have a car. It's a 1994 Saturn that I call Neptune because that's the obvious name for a space geek to give a blue-green Saturn.

3) Somewhere around December, Neptune's odometer stopped working. For a long time, I thought that it was just the trip meter which wasn't working because I was using that to look at mileage between refueling. So it was a while before I realized the odometer was actually sitting still.

4) At the time the odometer broke, the mileage was 89,700.

So I finally needed to get other service (i.e. oil change and tire rotation) done and I dropped the car off at Saturn of Fairfax after work today. (This is also referred to as taking Neptune in for a doctor's appointment.) I asked about getting the odometer repaired. They told me that:

a) They could replace it, at a cost of roughly $500.

b) There is, however, no point in replacing it because they would have to set it to at least 96,000 miles based on the time since the last time I had Neptune in for service unless I could prove the actual mileage. I asked how one proves the mileage when the odometer is not working and they basically said, "well, you can't."

The guy then explained that federal law requires them to use an average mileage of 12000 miles a year when setting a new odometer. Otherwise it is odometer fraud. (I am not convinced that he is correct. I believe that there is a way to do some certification on the odometer which says it does not reflect the actual mileage. But this is what he told me.)

Now, here is the part that is stupid. From February 1994 to September 2007, which is 163 months, I drove a little under 89,000 miles. Which is about 550 miles per month. So, one would expect that in 7 months, I would have driven about 3850 miles, not 7000 miles. And that number is, of course, inflated since the mileage I drove in Los Angeles (where I commuted by car) is far higher than the mileage I drive here where I commute by public transit.

In fact, they have records of the mileage since I moved here because they record it when you take the car in for service, so they could do a better estimate.

In short, they persuaded me not to get the odometer repaired. I'm happy to save the money. But I was kind of looking forward to seeing it turn over to 100,000.

By the way, if you think I'm pathetic, my mother drives a 1978 Olds Cutlass, which has just over 50,000 miles on it.