No Prizes
The Home Page of Derek Sunshine

April 25, 2002

I decided to just spend tonight reading through the New Yorker and listening to Damon and Naomi's latest album "Song of the Siren". The CD is from a concert during their tour for "Damon and Naomi with Ghost". They're joined by Michio Kurihara from Ghost on electric guitar. I was unsure if I'd enjoy it, since most of the cuts on the CD are live versions from the studio album. However, with only Damon and Kurihara on guitars and Naomi on bass and harmonium, they have a whole new feel. Stripped down to just three instruments and two voices, the songs still come through clearly and strongly. Kurihara's electric guitar is one of the stars of the CD, he creates a whole range of sounds on his SG. The recording is excellent with just a little distortion on Kurihara's guitar. As a bonus, the album is a split CD/DVD with an audio CD of the songs and a DVD documentary of the tour. I haven't had a chance to watch the DVD since I'm still observing Turnoff-TV week. I'd actually like to listen to the CD a few more times before I tackle the documentary.

April 23, 2002

My car got mildly sideswiped ("rubbed" in NASCAR parlance), blowing out a tire and putting a small dent in the front right fender Monday. The culprit drove away. I waited for the state police to show, then changed the tire on the side of Interstate 64. I don't want to talk much more about it; I'll be talking enough with insurance adjusters and body shops.

Alien Interstates

Waiting on the side of the road and changing the tire, I realized how alien highways are. They're large; each lane is twelve feet. At six lanes across with another twenty four for outside shoulders and another twenty four for the inside shoulders – think a second – that's 120 feet. The lot for my house isn't 120 feet long. Along the side of the highway was a steep slope covered in vines and weeds. A large orange trash bag had been thrown to the bottom of the slope along with a empty cardboard box. The shoulder was small wet pieces of gravel, wedged into sand. The guardrail was curved and low; it could offer neither comfort nor protection to a human being on the side of the road.

Unless you're a police officer, you probably don't spend much time on the side of highways. You can't easily enter it or exit it on foot. Although the asphalt provides a smooth path, it's too large and seems to curve in inconvenient directions if you're trying to walk somewhere. And lastly, at the human scale, there's nothing to see. A driver, traveling at over 80 feet a second, is always focused 100, 400 or even 1000 feet ahead of himself. A man on foot, traveling at five feet a second, has time to look at things three feet away and usually pays good attention to whatever his feet are doing five and half feet (or so) beneath his chin.

That distortion of distance explains why so much of what you see in the suburbs is ... well, ugly. Everything is made to be seen in passing and ignored as you enter it from the parking lot. Except for an sign and some decoration around the door, offices and stores are all brick boxes. The illuminated signs and occasionally the shape of the roof clue in the drive – "Oh, I can buy food here" or "Oh, I make my living here." Even the landscaping around suburban buildings is ugly – large tidy curves of pansies or liriope. To a driver speeding by, they're a band of color, a distraction from the monotony of asphalt and grass. If you walk by one of these, they're an eyesore – a drab grid of puny vegetation precisely plonked into a mound of mulch.

Opps, I didn't use enough links again. So visit this one recommended by memepool.

April 21, 2002

This is the time of year when Virginia's trees – the oaks, the maples, the hollies, etc, spew tons of hyper-toxic pollen into the air. Like a third of my friends, I am an allergy sufferer – or in the medical parlance, I suffer from Allergic Rhinitis. I was talking with some recent arrivals to the Old Dominion Saturday night. Several of them agreed – they were allergy-free in their home states. However, the quantity and potency of Virginia pollen struck them like a clapper striking a bell. For me, the season begins in mid-April with an itching sensation in my nose, annoying yet tolerable. Then, gradually, everything inside my nose starts to swell, until it's sealed shut, tight as a cork in a bottle. At that point, my eyes don't water. I no longer sneeze. My sinuses, turbinates and infundibula balloon up to keep the fine yellow dust out of my head – along with the air that carries it. Like thousands of others across Virginia, I'm mighty grateful for Fexofenadine – aka Allegra. Now, if I can only get some cool free stuff from Hoechst Marion Roussel.

The Sunday Paper – Again

The Times Dispatch is a adequate regional paper. But every so often, they have their moments. If you get a chance, read Mark Holmberg. His columns are generally quite good and he has a great article this week on turning off the TV. I pulled the plug recently; I downgraded from digital cable down to the basic local broadcast. I've only spent one night watching TV – a night when I was tired enough that I should have gone to bed early. I also got roped into the last few minutes of overtime of a pro basketball game on Wednesday. I clocked about two and a half hours total for the week. But, as Holmberg points out, it is now officially National TV-Turnoff week. So, it's time to work on those "to do's" for the Blog and plow through that pile of New Yorkers. For seven days, the Great One-Eyed Deity will go dark