Can't take his grog, redux/suggestibility and early morning TV

So it really looks like I'm significantly less tolerant of caffeine these days. Yesterday, in the grand tradition of slacking off near to the holidays, myself and the folk with whom I work most of the time now spent most of the afternoon watching The Office on DVD (a BBC sitcom) and drinking Irish coffee. As a man with some experience in the area, I brought the Bushmills, and did much of the brewing.

And after a few of these puppies in the mid afternoon, I found myself awake at around 3:30 am this morning.

I sometimes frighten myself with what I get up to at such hours. This morning, I found myself watching, of all things, Center Stage, a movie about a buncha earnest young aspiring dancers at a New York City ballet school, and thinking 'hey, this isn't bad'...

Except that, in retrospect, it probably was, kinda. I mean, apart from the dancing, which did look impressive--at least to this guy, who's really not into that art form--it did rather lean on the performing arts student movie cliches.

I mean, let's check for the standards: chick with bulimia? Check. Scrappy/misunderstood/unjustly-abused chick with idiosyncratic talent? Check. Bitchy teachers/choreographers? Check. Psycho stage mom? Check.

Now, in fairness, it was pretty much that or various bad old Glen A. Larson series. And in fairness, some of those elements (bulimia et al) are probably almost required in the genre if you're ever going to get a box office, and overall, my bet is folks who watch these kinda things would probably say it was actually pretty standard to slightly well done as such things go. My point is: this kinda thing normally really ain't my bag. I only recognized the form because I saw Fame however many decades it was ago, and read enough movie reviews on and off to know somewhat indirectly how it's usually done. And yet, strangely, at three'o'clock in the morning, a guy whose taste in dance is normally, well, a non-issue (can you really be said to have taste of any kind in an art form you know almost nothing about?) finds himself watching a good part of the thing.

I wonder if this sheds a little light on the whole three in the morning televangelism/infomercial thing (borrowing an observation also from one Paul K, also frequently awake at that hour, who noticed this specifically about three in the morning 'infomercials' for the odd and frequently remarkably useless household gizmos sold through such vehicles). That is: at three'o'clock in the morning, the mind is, more likely than not, a bit more plastic than it is by daylight. So yeah, Peter Popoff (yes, he of the infamous hidden radio transmitter-assisted faith healing schtick) is out there hawking 'holy water', and maybe it makes a little more sense to some folk than it would at ten am after a cup of coffee. Same for the various power-assisted juicers, odd mops, and mutant exercise equipment also being hawked. By day, you'd look at it, think, ummm... no thanks. At three in the morning, you're slightly more inclined to be a sucker.

Just a thought. But may I respectfully suggest to anyone else periodically awake at that time to keep it in mind?

Suggested rules of thumb--do not:

• read the literature of any new religions/cults (and remember: a religion is just a cult that made it),
• buy anything sold via a PO Box,
• answer any unsolicited email,
• nor watch anything with an 800 or 900 number scrolling across the screen

...in these hours.

And, for that matter, don't watch any old Glen A. Larson series at those hours either. Especially Knight Rider. That's just not healthy.

1926

So it's reminiscence time over at Pharyngula. Some of the folks, looking at their relatively innocent selves in old photos, wide eyes oblivious to pleasantness and unpleasantness to come, put me in mind of Weldon Kees' 1926:

...I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

I did not know them then...

Whole thing is over at this site*.

(Dunno about linking to this. Is Kees outta copyright yet? If ya feel guilty, go buy an anthology with him in it, assuming you don't already have one.)

(*Edited to add: the server in the link above seems to go down daily, and for extended periods of time. Same work is also at this link.)

Bitchin' 'bout the weather

Thirty degrees below, this morning. -44, with the wind chill. Yes, that's Celsius. Not that it makes much difference in that range.

I know this probably makes me one sick puppy, but I actually kinda like weather like this. There's a surreal otherworldly quality about mornings like this in Ottawa--anything significantly warmer than ambient gives off plumes of steam and smoke that shoot straight up into the cold, clear air--billowing white columns from the tips of chimneys, steam from the sewers. The air feels like a knife in the lungs... But in a good 'you're very awake now' way.

Still. Ya gotta wonder about the sense of living in a climate in which it occasionally makes about as much sense to measure the temperature on the Kelvin scale.

Yep. Only another 240 degrees to absolute zero. And it's still only December.