March 9th, 2019

Hey there,

Stuff today.

Update on the hair project.  As a brief recap, due to a long bout with a bad case of scalp psoriasis, was not able to have long hair, but it went away for some reason and want to see what it looks like grown out.  Had a bush when I was little and the first nickname I ever had in elementary school was tumbleweed.  As you can see, that moniker was well deserved.

It is longer now than it has ever been and am committed to getting it to ponytail length.  It is drawing attention and receive comments from friends like, 'what's going on?' and even acquaintances like the ladies at the 7-11 are making gestures.  Got to thinking about what it is gonna look like and Weird Al came to mind although his curls are tight.  We met this guy at an Italian restaurant a few years ago and think it might be close.

It was the end of an era last weekend.  We moved to Seattle in 1995 and one of the first things I did was scan the radio dial for sports talk radio.  Soon found the fellas on KJR and listened all day.  While most of those fellas came and went, John Clayton's Saturday football show from 9a to Noon has been a rock.  He moved to 710 many years ago, but the show stayed the same with the weekly rotation of callers rarely changing: Commando Dave, Jet, Irish Menke, Raider Jim, JB in Renton, etc.  The show became easier to listen to in podcast form and have been  able to listen in Taiwan uninterrupted with it being my accompaniment on Sunday morning walks.  Hard to think of a time I missed it in those 24 years and John and his cast of characters have been friends all that time.

Last Sunday he announced the station was cutting the show.  He still does 2 hours daily and has regular spots on other shows on the station, but the Saturday show was all football and delivered in just the right way for me.  John said that the reason the station wanted to change the programming is that they have young voices at the station and they needed a platform,  and his show was the right spot to give them a go.  Doubt I'll listen to it as it is gonna be focused on "all sports" including new ones like e-sports to attract younger ears.  The obvious question is do younger ears even know what a radio is?  If these younger voices are so hot and need a platform, why aren't they doing YouTube or whatever the kids use to intake their information.  Sad and pissed in equal measure.

I try not to give recommendations about shows to watch cause that feels like a cliché.  Everyone has their pet one they recommend, but want to talk about one that I see getting ripped in the media that I really like.  It is The Orville and is Seth Macfarlane's ode to Star Trek.  The reviews I read feel like the person has never watched it cause they all call it a bad Star Trek Next Generation rip off and since it is Seth Macfarlane, gets dismissed as juvenile with Family Guy comparisons.  It is absolutely a rip off but intentionally so.  There are juvenile jokes too, but it isn't a slave to them but rather they are mixed in to show that there is still humor in the future.  The filming and effects are great, but what I like most about is the story lines are weird.  For example, if you know Star Trek's Worf character, he is a tough no nonsense warrior  The Orville has his doppelganger and in one episode, he almost destroys the ship due to an addiction to pornography.  I guess that does sound stupid, but it was done in a really noirish way.  Anyhoo, I say give it a try if you liked The Next Generation or stuff that is just weird. 

I hope to one day recommend a movie (or at least a Netflix series) that I am work shopping and it will star me or will cast someone like me (Weird Al?) to play me.  Got the idea watching the Oscars and reading the fallout from the Best Picture winner the Green Book.  .  Have never seen that film, but envision this movie as a cross between it and Karate Kid.

The pitch... I am the driver and my passenger is an old Chinese woman. We drive around and I take her to places like the beauty salon to get her hair permed, ironically in curls like mine, or to the store to buy clothes made from bygone era man-made fabrics in floral patterns where the top and bottoms clash.  We'll have conversations about our clash of cultures too.  She will ask me if I have gained weight on a daily basis (yes, because I eat my feelings) and I will roll my eyes when I see her elbow her way to the front of the produce stand.  We ultimately will find common ground over our mutual mistrust of an ethnic group to be named later. Coming soon

Mentioned before that there is a local Taiwan band that I really like called Crocodelia (they have an EP out on Spotify)  Crocodelia has been on hiatus for a while cause one of the brothers is doing his service time in the military, but the other brother, Yufu Chen, is performing with a cast of characters and we had the opportunity to see them in a tiny basement club.  The sound was absolutely atrocious but the talent of this guy still shined through.  Hope good things come to them and have committed to seeing his stuff whenever.

Went with a couple of buddies who are in a band and we are waiting for the show to start and see the instrument that the lady is playing below.

It has strings and keys and none of us know the name of it, but one of the guys says it is a panini press, which gives us a great idea.  I have been to shows, and saw someone do this on Saturday Night Live recently, where they have a performer paint a picture during the song/show.  It is a cool visual and adds to the overall experience,  We think that an equally cool experience, and one that would activate another sense during a show, would be to have a person on stage making panini's during the set.  They could put some flourishes to their efforts and hand the product to those in the crowd.  Doesn't have to be paninis per se, but who is saying 'no' to that?

While I was typing the above, just got an alert that they are playing next Friday night at a place with an excellent sound system.

A brief follow-up to something that has been bugging me since 2018.  When we were in Ireland, there were a ton of sheep and we saw many of them had paint on their backs.

Seemed like an odd thing as the wool is the product and thought it was a way to identify the owner.  Had a rare window with time to randomly search the Internet and found this blog post that details why they are.  They tie a bag of paint around a ram's neck and after he makes sweet love to a ewe, the farmer sees the paint on her back and knows to move her to another field where she can give birth to the next generation.

One more maybe not so brief follow-up to close festivities for today.  Pride.  Am on the offensive against not only the word but to get people to reevaluate the feelings of personal pride they have in other people's accomplishments for selfish reasons into just being happy for those people.

I don't know what the word for pride is in Chinese, but think it relates to their concept of 'face".  In preparation for this rant, I looked at some articles and think this one does a nice job defining it and comparing to western ideas on the topic....guilt v shame and individual v group based cultures and this even uses 'pride' as one of its definitions of 'face'.  Totally get it and with almost everything  there are positives and negatives to each...whatevs.

Here is why I'm beefed up about face this week.  Warning, when I go on a beef, the swears come out,   The school baseball team that I'm involved with is newish....they played softball for 35 years and only changed to baseball 3 years ago and so do not have a deep history with it and worse, do not have the facilities on campus to play.  We can practice but there's no space for a full field and we'd be knocking windows out in the neighbors apartments if we tried to hit.  That means we have to look off campus at public fields and there are many along the rivers around town.  The school researched and found some available and we reserved them for several nights of the week during our very short season.  We show up for the first one, 30 kids and coaches on a bus that takes 40 minutes to get there as it is rush hour, and there are local teams playing on the fields.  After more than an hour sitting on the bus waiting for the all the coaches and park officials to hash it out, they vacate and we get on the field.  We come out the next night and the exact same thing happens.  We are scheduled there the next few weeks but we decide not to pursue going there any more.

Here is how it gets explained to me.  Yes, we reserved the field, which I must say are free, but these local teams practice there every week.  They don't reserve them for whatever reason but just assume they are theirs cause they are there all the time.  Turns out that in the disputes at the fields those nights, we call the city reservation desk and the clerk that takes the reservations confirms we have the field and tells the locals to vacate, which they do not do.  The clerk then has to call her supervisor who has to get on his scooter and come down to tell the locals that the fields are ours.  Me, very Western/white boy is livid.   Our schools folks explain to me that we have to be sensitive to the local community.  As tax payers, thought we are part of the local community, but they tell me that since we are the rich kids, have to be extra deferential.  They go onto say that in the events of the nights we went out that the clerk lost face, the supervisor lost face and the local coaches lost face.  That's a lot of face.  Are we the rich kid school?  Absolutely positively.  We just want to play some ball, did the right stuff and we have to freaking suffer cause we don't want these folks, who all agreed on the facts, cause we don't want to cause someone to lose face?  Think it is all for the best that I was not part of the negotiations cause I woulda been brutal and it crossed my mind to tell these local folks they should be nice cause some of our kids are in families that own the 7-11's and they will need jobs one day.  Yes, it's no secret that I am a nasty asshole.  Facts are facts and get the fuck off my gawdamn field..  Feels suspicious to me and that we are using this face to protect people from being accountable.  We don't get the fields either way, so either the locals are gonna think the Americans are assholes for calling them out, or they are gonna think that we are pussies for not fighting for them.  You know where I stand on the asshole v pussy debate.    And if the Chinese are so worried about face, then why are there no end to shit on YouTube that shows employers humiliating their workers for poor performance.  Here is one where the staff has to crawl on the street after poor sales.

And while this one is hard to believe, sales people drinking piss for not meeting their targets.

Fuckface.