OK, it’s finally become evident what’s driving this blog, and that’s the entertainment value of watching my various body parts fail. But if all that has only amounted to minor discomforts and inconveniences up until now, the headliner for the past three months has been rather more overwhelming.

Sunday morning in late March. Long before dawn. Chicago’s final sleet storm of the year is playing out in spectacular fashion, solid sheets of ice-dappled rain pouring from the sky. I’m off to another day at the office. At a street corner two blocks away, drainage is only a distant memory…the slushy water stands six inches deep, extending nearly halfway out to the center of the road.

So, annoyed but not particularly surprised, I scarcely break my pace as I gracefully leap across it. Only, in the course of leaping, the left leg which is pushing me across the miniature pond bends a little further backwards than it should, and suddenly I find myself with one limb nearly immobilized in searing agony.

I could outline the following months in considerable detail, a la Douglas Adams’ How I Scaled the North Face of the Megapurna With a Perfectly Healthy Finger But Everything Else Sprained, Broken, or Bitten Off by a Pack of Mad Yaks…but you know, I’ll spare ya. Which I might not have done a month or two ago, as my kneecap refused to find its way back to the proper position and I was becoming resigned to spending the remainder of my days with 4/5 of my conscious mind obscured in a haze of pain. But this month, I’ve had the arthroscopic surgery to fix the torn cartilage and now I’m doing the physical therapy, and the limb is feeling better all the time. I’m still not sure it’s ever going to be exactly right again. But at least now it’s only a minor discomfort and inconvenience.

Tammy’s visited twice in the interim, and I wish circumstances had been better for actually showing her about the city! But we managed a few notable diversions, like walking the length of Lincoln Park, buying a cake from the House of Fine Chocolates, and checking out the various beatnik-style coffee shops around my neighborhood. She’ll be visiting again next week, and I have some more ambitious activity in mind, like taking in a few shows and music performances (no details until I’ve surprised her!).

One thing driven home to me on these occasions, though, is that the Chicago which is here now isn’t the one that I fell for nearly three decades ago.  I know that I mildly bemoaned this fact in one of my first blog postings, but that was only about restaurants.  I did, after all, have other haunts around the city.  So many independent bookstores that had their quirky stocks…Kroch’s and Bretano’s in the Loop, with sections on psychology, mythology and anthropology that could always offer up an obscure tome; Tower Records with its alternative magazines and vast laserdisc (later DVD) selections, always good for browsing; the Aspidistra Bookshop with its tottering piles of used books; the comic book shop down by Loyola with its dusty racks of old movie fanzines; the unabashed full-spectrum spirituality in Transitions Bookplace; the Old World elegance of the shelves in Brent’s Books on the Magnificent Mile…ah, they’re all gone now.  Even Borders used to be able to cough up the occasional intriguing small press title in their four-story local flagship store…but with over a third of that space now given over to overpriced CDs and videos, the book stock is squeezed down to the mass market bestsellers.

I miss the days when I could go shopping for computer games after work in CompUSA, or the latest collectible card games in Comics Paradise.  Or even walk through the pet section of Woolworth’s on State Street, or leave Marshall Field’s with a box of Frango Mints in one of the store’s distinctive forest green paper bags.

Sad to think that probably what killed them all was Amazon.com…and I’m still happily complicit in that slaughter.

Of course, it wasn’t all shopping, but still nothing seems the same.  Grant Park with its ragged bandshell and tall prairie grasses has been squeezed out by the shiny chrome monstrosities that inhabit the new Millennium Park.  The monthly festivals of national cinemas at the Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago seemed to have become a thing of the past with its move to a new space and a new name (the Gene Siskel Film Center).  And so many neighborhoods that I used to wander through with regularity have lost those anchors, retail or otherwise, that I once visited them for.

It doesn’t seem like so many years…a scant two decades…but how things have changed.

Ah, well.  Life goes on, at least virtually!  Tammy and I recently achieved a little milestone for ourselves, in the online World of Warcraft.  After months of play, we’ve managed to bring our characters up to the game’s current cap of level 80 for the first time.  So hats off to Worldwinder the shaman and Sabyn the priest!

It’s slacked off a little bit in the last month or two, but I did make my slog through a few TV shows on my Zune during the daily commute.  First season of THE TWILIGHT ZONE was quite entertaining, although I couldn’t help but notice how many story twists later showed up in Rod Serling’s script for PLANET OF THE APES (astronauts crash-land in a merciless “alien” desert which ultimately turns out to be in Nevada; astronaut is rescued by aliens but finds himself esconced in a zoo display; space expedition lands on an asteroid holding a mysterious waxworks exhibit of human society).  Second season of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. unfortunately finds the series already beginning its precipitous plunge from season one…while the stories are still dynamic, the producers have engaged Lalo Schifrin to take Jerry Goldsmith’s bright jazzy theme and turn it into, well, Schifrin’s “Mission Impossible” theme, and the performances by leads Robert Vaughan and David McCallum have already lost the crackle they displayed during the show’s first year.

Probably the video acquisition which has me most excited at the moment is a Blu-Ray release of season one of (wait for it) STAR TREK.  Now, that admission may be sufficient to raise an enormous yawn, but I have to make a weird little confession…this may just be the very first time I have ever seen this series.  That’s weird because, well, I was a crazy Trekkie between the ages of 11 and 14 or so, madly devouring the novelizations and “making of” books and any magazine articles I could get my hands on.  The only thing that I couldn’t seem to gain access to was the actual TV episodes themselves, which Toledo television never got around to broadcasting on a regular basis.  It’s hard to believe at this point, too, but STAR TREK was pretty much all there was at the time in terms of media sci-fi…the only post-Flash Gordon series with a regular cast that dove wholeheartedly into a future milieu and hard SF themes, places that television just wouldn’t go until STAR WARS hit the screen.  Of course, even before STAR WARS my attention had started wandering elsewhere, so I only hung around the periphery of Trek and its fan culture by the time the movies came along.

Now that I’m watching the series for what we may term the first time?  Oh, I’m enjoying it enormously!  The stories may be rather pulp-heavy (particularly evident since a lot of my reading these days is vintage sci-fi pulp), but the cast and production really do carry it off very well.  It also helps that the show has been remastered in high definition, going back to and cleaning up the original negatives, spicing things up with reworked special effects fully in the spirit of the series, and even re-recording the music from the original sheets.  I have to say, no television show from 40 years ago has ANY right to look and sound this good.

Looking and sounding good is also the biggest achievement of the new STAR TREK movie, my first visit to the cinema in ages.  What drew me to it was a glimpse in the trailer of the Enterprise under construction, a mass of chaotically slashing lines and clouds of energy that looked like nothing so much as one of those abstract paintings which used to illustrate sci-fi paperback covers back in the Sixties.  But what I appreciate most, probably, is the performances by the actors; they manage to capture the essence of the original stars in a way that’s most evident to me since I’m just watching the original show now!  There are some thematic elements I dislike…the Tiny Toon versions of the characters who can operate a starship because they just happen to be such magically talented teenagers; and Kirk’s deliberate execution of the villain at the end of the piece, conducted under circumstances that make it a pure exercise in self-gratification, which is about as diametrically opposed to the philosophies of the original creators of the STAR TREK universe as you can get.  Still, I was impressed enough with the cast that I wouldn’t mind seeing if a sequel comes along.

The hour is late, so I must wrap this up…but at least I’ve gotten it going.  Again.  My apologies that I haven’t been answering emails under the circumstances, but I should be getting back to you all very, very soon!

It’s funny how this works, but…the longer I delay in updating the blog, the more difficult it becomes to get started.  There’s no major reason that I haven’t been keeping up with it (although the splinted finger was a good start at an excuse); largely it’s just been pure inertia.

So yes, we will start with the finger.  It’s still here, and it’s working better all the time.  I was a little worried at first, as when the splint initially came off, the finger naturally wanted to stay in that extended position, and when I bent it the stretching of the skin over the joint pinched horribly.  But then a funny, nay hilarious, thing happened…a couple of weeks later, I managed to sprain another finger on the very same hand!  Woot.  It was nothing that needed medical attention, but I did have to start wearing a soft splint on that one, and its range of motion was greatly limited…just about to the same degree, in fact, as my newly healed forefinger was.  So I had to start using the forefinger more to make up for it, and as the range of motion between the two was just about equal, they both kept pace with each other as the sprained digit healed.  Now the hand is 100 percent functional…the forefinger is more like 90 percent functional, as bending it completely still pinches, but so long as I don’t need to hold open the jaws of a raging rabid pit bull, it does everything it needs to.  That’s about it for health issues!

Well, except for this other one.  The search for the mystery hernia has been an ongoing activity, to the extent that I was avoiding forking out for another useless ultrasound, anyway.  But I finally strained myself to the degree that I really thought my intestines were performing a mass migration.  So I dug out the doctor’s prescription that I’ve been ignoring for a few months, and returned to the ultrasound lab for some more cold-gel fondling.  The result is one that I’m happy with…sort of, given a choice.  The doctor’s taught me a new word:  Hydrocele.  It’s an accumulation of peritoneal fluid in the scrotum, varying dependent on abdominal pressure.  This also explains why it’s bothered me most when I’m most out of shape, and receded when I exercise.  So that’s what I should be doing, as surgical measures to drain it are both disconcerting to contemplate, and only temporary in nature.

Hearkening back to another topic of a post or two ago, I’ve made both purchases that I had been thinking about (surprise!)…a set of bluetooth stereo headphones, and a portable video/MP3 player.

The headphones are…ok.  They’re very light, and very convenient.  They hold enough charge for a day or two of listening.  The downside is, the sound quality is quite thin and tinny.  For podcasts, where the recording isn’t necessarily extravagant to begin with, they’re quite nice to use.  For music?  Meh.  For that latter purpose, I’ve bought a set of Sennheiser PX 100 collapsible headphones, which pump out some incredible volume and range, and fold away quite nicely to boot!

My player, on the other hand, has left me ecstatic.  I was having trouble making a decision on what to buy…I was not about to join the glassy-eyed shambling ranks of the black t-shirted Apple iPod zombies, especially after hearing about the unforgivingly inflexible operation of the iTunes software, where the slightest glitch with your purchased music could lose the songs, never to hear them again.  The main alternatives, from Microsoft, Creative and Archos, all had their weaknesses, but finally I decided to go with the most stable-sounding device, and that was the Microsoft Zune.

And yes, I am very, very happy with it.  The color screen is nearly twice the size of the iPod’s, and while I’m still not inclined to forego watching my DVD movies on the big screen at home, the Zune is proving perfect to catch up with all the TV series that I’ve had piling up.  On my daily commute I’ve just finished watching the first season of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, interspersed with episodes of FAERIE TALE THEATRE; maybe I’ll load up the second season of the THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. next!

While it would seem enough to be able to dump all my 900 or so albums onto the player, the Zune also came with a perk that I wasn’t expecting at all…and that’s Microsoft’s answer to iTunes, the Zune Marketplace.  Not too exciting on the surface, it offers music for the same basic price as Apple, $1 per tune.  But there is another aspect to it, and that is the Zune Pass.  Pay $15 a month, and you can download as many albums as you like from the Marketplace, listening to them all for as long as you subscribe!  I’ve already added about 80 or so to my collection, filling out some gaps in my soundtracks and Bollywood scores, discovering jazz artists like Keiko Matsui and Patricia Barber, exploring new classical and world music composers, rediscovering old pop groups from my childhood, and even entering the realm of contemporary artists like Ani DiFranco and Squirrel Nut Zippers.  Not bad for the money, and the money is even better since you get to keep 10 tunes a month for free with your subscription, so I’m really only paying $5 for this musical lending library.

It’s also a sweet sensation to have the cover for each album show up on the screen as you flip through them…feels just like the old days of thumbing through my LPs to choose something to listen to!

Final event of note is that I’ve finally met a sweet woman whom I’ve long carried a virtual torch (not to mention a large glowing axe) for, and that is Tammy from St. Louis.  We first encountered each other in, of all places, WORLD OF WARCRAFT.  I’d been playing the game for something like a year, and was wandering the lands guildless.  She first piqued my interest in the guild recruitment channel with the intriguingly pagan resonance of her guild and character names (“Spirits of Solstice” and Beltane, respectively)…but she truly hooked me with her guild recruitment message, which included the word “wacky”.  “Count me in!” my gnome mage yelled, and soon I was joining them for drunken assaults on pirate coves and nude swims in shark-infested waters.  (I swear they weren’t my idea!  Well, except for the pirate thing.)

She came to visit Chicago a few weeks ago, and it would almost have been perfect if not for the driving downpour that preceded her into the city and the blinding blizzard that greeted her departure!  We braved the freezing temperatures long enough to take in a few favorite restaurants, a trip to the top of the John Hancock Center, and visits to the Art Institute and the Field Museum, but were driven back by the snow when I tried to show off the lakeshore beach a block from home.  I just hope that there’s more clement weather when Tammy comes to the city again in another couple of weeks.

Modern bluescreen technology gave us this momento of Tammy's first visit

But really, it should have looked like this…

I had just started to make some progress in catching up my email…and then, last weekend, I had a little incident involving an industrial-strength pair of scissors.  I was at the office, preparing to cut the plastic strap off a carton of paper.  The scissors slipped, and suddenly I found myself missing quite a large chunk of flesh over the middle joint of my left index finger.

Happily it seemed to stitch up in the ER quite readily, and I hope I can expect the stitches to come out next week.  But since it is the flexing portion above the joint, the finger has also been splinted, which has made typing something of a random proposition.  Forgive me if I’m not too vocal for a few more days!

One matter worth noting, at least, is that after some months of staffing stability, the bank I work at had another abrupt round of downsizing yesterday.  So there were some tears evident among both those who were leaving, and those who were staying.  It was quite a big round of cuts, something like 10-15%, and came out of nowhere.  The timing elicits a snort of disdain from me, given that it happened the morning after the election.  So we’re to assume the economy is going into the shitter only after the political party that’s put the nation $10 trillion into debt is being kicked to the curb?  Feh.

Yes, I know…I should give up on the attempted puns…but just try to stop me!

You might have noticed this year that, as my DVD collecting has slacked off thanks to Netflix rentals and dwindling catalog releases, I’ve started to go wild with spending in another category: electronic gadgetry. Between the phonograph turntable, the big-screen TV, the surround sound system, the Blu-Ray player, the Amazon Kindle, and one or two items yet unmentioned (like a portable word processor), I’ve probably doubled my power consumption.

But my desires have started to get really obscure.  Take for instance what I’ve been looking into this week:  Bluetooth stereo headphones.  Yes, after years of riding the trains and buses with headphone cables wrapping around my neck and torso, getting yanked around from my head or out of the portable player, snapping off the earphones or breaking loose the soldered connection in the player, I’ve decided it would be really nice to do away with the cord entirely.  Why not one of those snazzy earpieces like cellphones sport these days?  Well, yes, bluetooth headphones do exist now, as a quick look on Amazon will demonstrate.  Unfortunately, reading the user reviews dims the discovery.  Excessive weight, bulky designs, fragility, short battery life, poor sound quality…there’s a litany of flaws to be had.  And checking out the manufacture dates, most of these are already years old; apparently they just haven’t made enough of a splash in the market to encourage evolutionary technological development.  Online discussion of them is also all but nonexistent; I’ve tried asking for recommendations from both portable player and audiophile forums, but my inquiries haven’t seen a single response yet.

I may yet become one of the brave pioneers in that technology, but the prospect isn’t exactly thrilling me right now.

After finally updating my MP3 music library from the now-unsupported MusicMatch Jukebox to the less than optimal Windows Media Player, I’ve also been giving some thought to upgrading from my old Creative Zen portable player.  But I may be cooling on that upgrade too…while I’ve pretty much narrowed the field down to either the Archos 605 or the Zune 120, both have their flaws.  And while going to a color video screen would be a nice step up, particularly in allowing quick navigation of long audio tracks, I’m not sure just what actual videos I would have a low enough opinion of to watch on a 3″ screen.

I do have a reason for such a sudden obsession with the portable audio player paradigm, at least.  I have discovered the world of INTERNET PODCASTS!  It’s only in a modest way, mind.  But for the last few weeks, I’ve been working my way through the programs at Anime World Order.  Hosted by three 20-somethings who just jawbone the hours away (Daryl, who’s into vintage robot shows and the more outrageously violent gekiga genre; Clarissa, who takes upon herself the task of reviewing the latest yaoi and “Boys’ Love” hits; and Gerald, whose tastes lean more towards older mainstream works), the show has managed to keep me consistently entertained on the bus, the subway, and in the office during off-hours.  The latter has had a particular impact for me, as those 12-hour Sundays which once felt excruciatingly long are now zooming right past, and my productivity increased some 30 percent to boot!  As old-school anime fans they’ve also expressed a lot of my own feelings about the genre that I’ve kept to a low mutter…the largely flagging quality of series in recent years, and the way in which anime conventions have basically turned away from anime itself to instead become giant Halloween costume parties for horny videogame-playing teenagers (check for instance 49 minutes into this podcast).  It would be nice if somebody launched their suggestion of a convention for attendees over the age of 18 only…but as it stands now, I’m seriously debating whether I want to subject myself to Anime Central again next May.

It will be awhile before I run out of AWO podcasts to listen to (I’m only on episode 32 right now), but once I do, there will undoubtedly be more to discover.

Despite, or perhaps because of, being laid low with my annual autumnal attack of bronchitis last weekend, I’ve continued to make good progress through my unwatched DVDs.  But I’ve also continued to make gigantic additions to the pile…such as the Definitive Twilight Zone Collection and all five seasons of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., for each of which I’ve only watched the first disc thus far.  For being half a century old, however, they’ve held up damn well!  Unlike me.

And the scrabble to stay in touch from this cluttered hovel o’mine continues! Maybe it’s just too optimistic of me to expect that my living schedule will stabilize to the point where I can actually settle into a regular routine that makes it easy to sit down and write at any time. But the ground still shifts…going into my new work schedule, only to have it interrupted as I filled in for my vacationing supervisor for a week, and then returning to my new schedule in such a fashion that I had one day off between two work weeks; taking a few more days’ vacation time, but trying to catch up on my sleep for most of them; enjoying a brand new wave of bodily discomfort-shading-to-pain that had me severely worried until my doctor told me the day before yesterday that it was probably nothing, at which assurance it’s settled mostly to just discomfort.

It looks like smooth sailing ahead for the next month or two though, so I’ll try to be a little more attentive.

Eh, so let’s see, what news? Well, following my usual trend of proudly pointing out in a post that I haven’t bought something yet, and then purchasing it by the time the next post comes, I’ve now got a Blu-Ray DVD player. Since it felt like it would be a waste to buy a player that couldn’t serve in multiple capacities, I bought a Playstation 3 for that purpose. But I’m not sure it’s going to serve me in multiple capacities anyway…I have a great dislike for console controllers, which tend to abuse my big sensitive hands something awful, and the title selection itself for the PS3 is thoroughly uninspiring, shading mostly to shallow arcade games. I did arbitrarily buy one game, just to see how it feels on the big screen…ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION. Yes, the one that I played out on my PC for 500+ hours last year. It’s not a bad showpiece, anyway, even though the graphics are lower-resolution and less lush than the game’s PC counterpart allows for.

As for the high-definition video provided by the Blu-Ray format? Currently, I am seriously torn on how far I think it’s going to figure into my DVD purchases in the future. For a start, 90 percent of the titles coming out on BD right now are current Hollywood releases, which I daresay I have 0 percent interest in. Add to that the fact that nearly all older titles coming out are, again, Hollywood movies, my interest in which waned years and years ago…if I rewatch them again now, it’s likely to be only once in a Blu moon, unlike when I started collecting videos and could watch them over and over and over again. What genres might excite me enough to buy into? I would say early ’90s Hong Kong movies — which were not exactly shot on the best film stock or stored under the most pristine conditions anyway — and mid- to late-’90s anime — which was only ever mastered for standard video resolution. Thus the rub.

It hasn’t stopped me from buying a handful of BD discs, but for wildly varying reasons: titles that, by a freak of Amazon pricing, can be had for less than their standard DVD counterparts (POSTAL, SHINOBI); old favorites that can’t be found in a decent DVD release anyway (THE IPCRESS FILE, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL); classics that I’m not necessarily chomping at the bit to see again, but promise to be excellent showpieces (BLADE RUNNER, BLACK NARCISSUS); and the rare Asian treasure that has made it to BD (A CHINESE ODYSSEY).

So how big a difference does high definition make? Embarrassingly, I must say…not a great deal. Oh, it’s definitely there, but the devil is literally in the details. They come out sharp and crisp on Blu-Ray, but that’s not something which really jumps out at you, even on a 46″ screen. Check this example below, where I’ve “striped” full Blu-Ray resolution against a standard DVD (click on it to see the whole frame):

You can see the difference, particularly in the pebbles and stone walls and grass…but when you’re sitting back from the screen, and everything is moving at 24 frames per second, the advantage Blu-Ray has really is rather subtle. (Not helping things is the fact that some studios are using digital noise reduction on their releases, which actually blurs the details that high definition should bring out!) Another advantage BD format has is better color fidelity. But is it worth paying double the price of a regular DVD? Especially when I’ll likely be purchasing any titles for the second or third time?

I’m having my doubts. But the day is young for the new format, so we’ll see what develops.

One thing I’ve managed in recent weeks is to make some serious inroads into my unwatched anime discs…putting away about 1/12 of them! WITCH HUNTER ROBIN, PLANETES, DIAMOND DAYDREAMS, ONE PIECE, SLAYERS GORGEOUS… The one which really stood out (and took me by surprise, at that) was PLANETES. It starts out slow and a touch cliched, a series about an orbital debris collection crew in the future that feels more like a slice-of-life salaryman show with some lovely outer space scenery tacked on. But it slowly grows from there…first adding depth to the main characters, then delving into the personalities of an outward spiral of supporting characters, and suddenly before you know it the show has taken you into the sociopolitical situation on Earth, the issues encountered in colonizing the Moon, and the next stage of the space program as it launches itself towards Jupiter! It’s pretty remarkable, a really great show that’s going to stick with me, I’m just glad I managed to stay with it past the uninspiring initial episodes.

I also went back for a blast of the past, watching one of the first anime productions I’d ever seen: PROJECT A-KO! Given that it was originally released to theaters, this is one anime that would seriously merit a high-definition release (especially considering how poor all the standard video masterings have been)…if any theatrical prints survive, that is. Still, it was as fun as ever to watch, and better yet, the last DVD release came with a commentary track by director Yuji Moriyama (who’s been a guest at Anime Central a couple of times). Even after 20 years, he seems to remember the making of the film as if it were yesterday, and he points out an endless wealth of factoids about it…which animators were involved with each scene who went on to direct series of their own (like TENCHI MUYO, AH MY GODDESS, DIRTY PAIR, FIST OF THE NORTH STAR, UROTSUKIDOJI, THE IRRESPONSIBLE CAPTAIN TYLOR, NEON GENESIS EVANGELION, and AGENT AIKA), how at the dawn of OVAs it really seemed to have no budget restrictions (cel counts were never tracked), the wealth of visual in-jokes that would be impossible to pull off in these days of tense copyright restrictions and IP protection (A-Ko’s classmates include Kei and Yuri), even speculation that it may have inspired Miyazaki to make LAPUTO: CASTLE IN THE SKY. A fascinating talk…one gets the sense of how it ushered in the new blood which revolutionized the art form.

One day I may do another of those laundry lists, covering the anime series that first excited my interest back in those early days, which nothing this past decade can match up to.

Moving away from the video screen and into the realm of live performance, I’ve been delighted by the brief but notable return to the stage of Theater Oobleck. As they do every four years, they’ve come back to offer some satirical perspective on the latest presidential election. The script this time is also by my two favorite founding members: Jeff Dorchen, who wrote the immortal “Ugly’s First World”, and Danny Thompson, whose work has often made use of strange props, puppets and children’s toys.


The central conceit of the show finds Dick Cheney being controlled by an alien worm in his brain, and as the day when the reins of power are to be passed approaches, he has himself miniaturized and injected into the brains of the other candidates in order to determine which body to possess next. Needless to say it’s no easy task, particularly when Hillary Clinton plans to trap and use him for her own ends!

Years ago, I was in the habit of writing a complete summary of the plots of these shows, I know…but nowadays I’m just too lazy. Instead, here are a few reviews:
Chicago Stage Review
On Chicago Theatre

And a special blog by Jeff Dorchen himself:
How Do You Satirize an Election You’re Too Depressed to Think About?