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storm in the Catskills
Monday, August 16 2004
Though it has yet to earn me a second visit from the FBI, I've been thinking a little more than most people about the upcoming Republican Convention in New York City. Given the difference of opinion between the hosts and the guests, it's looking like it's going to be a little like Compton hosting a week-long Klan rally, if you can imagine Klan members eating in Compton restaurants and sleeping in Compton hotels. True, it's a little easier to identify a sheet-wearing Klansman in sunny California than a Brooks-Brothers-clad Republican in Midtown Manhattan, but I still think the upcoming convention will provide something of a statistically-valid epidemiological study on the health effects of consuming food containing hawked-up loogies.
After reading tonight's article in Salon, I'm a little concerned about the possibility of riots (possibly staged by Republican thugs wearing stick-on tattoos, mohawk wigs, and clip-on septum rings). Footage of such a thing would practically write its own Republican attack ad. On the other hand, concealing loogies beneath tenderloin steaks, clogging plumbing, and flipping off strategic circuit breakers is a great way to fight back without generating anything that can be presented on the nightly news. Another interesting idea is to silently
Light up the Sky. There was a reference to this link in the Salon article, and I think it's a great idea, with lots room for creative interpretation. Though we're tempted to light up some dough-faced Republicans, let's Light up the Sky instead!
This weekend I completed a bunch of work on a part of a content management system I'm building remotely for a company based in both Los Angeles and Dublin. Today on the weekly developer's call, the lead developer told me I'd somehow done it "wrong," but no details were offered, just that he'd be completing it himself. It was a most puzzling turn of events and left me wondering about the viability of this system he's developed. Of all people in the known universe, I understand it second-best, and yet the implication was that I can't be trusted to develop its applications. Who on earth can? I thought I'd done it fairly well considering the general lack of documentation for this big, complicated, totally unique framework of code.
Later on I drove out to Woodstock to attend to a woman with a Macintosh. The deeply-rutted road to her house kept climbing and climbing up Ohayo Mountain and then it came out of the woods into a spectacular clearing on the mountain's shoulder with a gorgeous northward view of a wide swath of lumpy Catskill peaks. In the middle of the clearing was a massive house centered around a wide, circular tower. The grounds were a complex of bluestone walls, artificial waterfalls, and stepped pathways. There were so many contractor trucks in the driveway that at first I thought I'd arrived at some sort of Buddhist group home entering the final leg of construction.
Workmen were there mostly to install a deck, which was being built using some sort of fancy wood a few grades better than the treated pine that I use for decks at my house. These workmen had an amusingly informal relation with the lady of the house, even thwacking her with a towel at one point.
Near the end of my visit a massive thunderstorm came pouring down over a mountain to the north. For a few minutes it looked like an exploding Mount St. Helens, with heavy sinking clouds standing in for pyroclastic flows. Then the sky went dark, the mountains disappeared, and we were hit by an astoundingly powerful storm. Thick branching trunks of lightning crossed the full length of the sky in a terrifying display.
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