If and how and where

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If you wanted to disappear in this highly technological age, when almost anything and anyone can be found, how would you do it? Where would you go?

Well, first thing I’d do is ask Osama bin Laden for some expertise on the subject. Thasswhat I’d do. But since I wouldn’t actually be able to find him, I’d probably just experiment. Like Evan.

Evan Ratliff is a freelance writer who decided to test the system after writing a story for Wired on the guy in Arkansas who faked his own death and disappeared. But this time, there’s fun and cash involved for the searchers, as opposed to the escapee.

Wired has offered 5,000 semolians to the first person to Find Evan Ratliff. That is actually quite cool. It’s like a cross between The Amazing Race and Where’s Waldo? As the article explains, Evan disappeared and left his credit card and other personal, trackable information with someone at the magazine. Clues are given out on the site each day.

If I had the time and the ambition (both in reeeeeally short supply at the moment), I’d get my sleuth on and try to participate. Sounds like fun.

But so does a nap. *yawn*

Fink out. (You’re yawning right now, aren’t you.)

RNF XXV

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Random Neuron Firings

I did not know there has been a tiger shelter operating in my town for the last 10 years. Odd.

Good Monday to you – I hope your weekend was delightful! Before I get to my day, which largely consists of being chained to this box, updating tour accounts, some RNFs:

So yeah, Mad Men. What a great opening episode last night. Full of symbolic dialogue and images (as usual), with a couple of surprises thrown in.

One of my favorite characters in the show is Sal, the closeted gay art director: completely Manhattan-Italian-hip, smooth, debonair, and hopelessly unhappy and repressed (read: married). He represents to me the whole of the cast — a bunch of upwardly-mobile, complicated, successful people, trying desperately to be someone else at all costs. It’s a fascinating look at human nature. I luv it.

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The Thriller officially starts his graduate education today. From 9 until 2, he’s at the seminary for orientation for the Licensed Clinical Counselor program. I am excited for him! Here he is, just before leaving this morning. I had to take a picture, you know, like your mom did when you left for your first day of school.

All he’s missing is the backpack and the lunch.

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Off to my day at the box. Stuck doing update work. Boring, but at least I’m air-conditioned. (Nasty hot/humid today.)

Photo credit: AMC

Cuts both ways

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It’s no secret to my family and friends that I possess slightly more than a passing interest in the Beatles, to include their history, their influence on popular culture, what inspired them, and the occasional darkness that fed their collective genius.

However, this decades-long quest has also revealed some uncomfortable truths about them. Shouldn’t surprise me; everyone has their unlovely side. But John Lennon’s was of such an unappealing variety (to me, anyway), I have trouble reconciling my scream-till-I’m-hoarse, gaga teenage dreamy picture of him with the man he actually was. Unfair of me, really.

Quite possibly the most compendious — and most difficult to prosaically read — of any Lennon book I’ve read has to be the latest from Philip Norman: John Lennon: The Life.

[This was one of the best pictures ever taken of him. Home run on the cover, Phil.]

I’m about two-thirds through the book. It’s a fascinating, yet difficult, read. Very heavy, stodgy British writing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just a different way of telling a tale and I’ve had to get accustomed to it. The double edge lies in the recounting of the ease with which Lennon dealt out cruelty to the people who loved him the most: his wife Cynthia, his son Julian, his manager (and secret admirer) Brian Epstein, and his close friends.

He could be at one moment compassionate, giving and kind, and at another, unmercifully vicious. He often berated his closest friends, insulting and humiliating them in public. Epstein was the recipient of many of Lennon’s one-line zingers, and he habitually absorbed them with silence and compliance. When Brian made a rare suggestion in the studio one day, John snapped back at the crowded control room with, “We’ll handle the music, Brian. You just worry about your 10 percent.” He incessantly and openly mocked Epstein for being a Jew and a homosexual.

Explosive and reactionary, he was heard to tell 5-year-old Julian, “No, I’m not going to fix your f*****g bicycle!”

He also had a bizarre need to make fun of the physically and mentally handicapped. Old TV footage bears this out. I have often seen him on film, pretending to be crippled or making faces that suggest he is a palsy victim. I have countless pictures in scads of books that show it as well. Bizarre. Traceable in cause and nature, but still bizarre.

The man was human. I’m not indicting him for being a) an insecure artist, b) something other than an angel, or c) a product of his environment and upbringing, which we all are. I’m not indicting him at all, actually. I’m just stewing in my kettle of realization that our idols put on their socks the same way we do. And that we’re all paradoxical in our own fashion. It’s all good.

Brotherly love, eh?

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OK, so I read this in my hometown newspaper this morning, opposite the headline, Twins blast Tribe, 11-0 (but we won’t discuss that today). From Rob Maaddi of the Associated Press:

Philadelphia sports fans, it is said, would boo a cancer patient. They threw snowballs at Santa Claus during a game in 1968. They cheered when the Dallas Cowboys’ Michael Irvin injured his neck and had to be carried off the field in 1999. They behaved so badly that a courtroom was set up at old Veterans Stadium to handle arrests.

But the City of Brotherly Love is where [quarterback Michael] Vick will make his comeback attempt.

Now fiends. Everybody knows that Michael Vick did a very bad thing. He did his time, he’s paying his debts, and hopefully he has learned something about compassion for animals. However, I still maintain that compared to some other athletes, he got an unusually harsh sentence. Would that mere humans received as much aggressive defense as dogs. (If you like, refer to a past rant on that subject.)

So, I ax you: Does Vick deserve a second chance? Or is it fitting that the mighty should fall once in awhile? I covet your articulate and compendious responses.

I think he’s going to get, if nothing else, a huge lesson in “I can’t let them get me down.” Still, if he doesn’t produce for the Eagles, everybody’s gonna look bad.

Fink out.

Finkday at last.

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Aren’t you happy? Me too. I have random thoughts this day.

I have chained myself to the sofa this whole weekend so I can get some Birdie stuff done before my cohort pulls out her (and my) hair. Looking forward to the show, but not to a lot of the insanity that precedes it.
Mac people: Three things I miss from the PC side are the “Home” key, the “End” key, and the Delete key that allows you to delete characters from the left. I use those three functions all the time; is there a workaround, or something really obvious I’m missing? I yearn to learn, but I’m too lazy to research it right at the moment.
Kristen, one of our regular Finkville fiends, started her own blog. Check it out here and leave her some love. (Samuel…no post since May? Sheesh.)
I’m worried about BoomR’s company’s reorganization plan.
The Thriller was accepted into the Masters in Clinical Counseling program at the seminary — yay! He starts classes in October. Now he can practice his psychoanalysis skills on me.
Mavis is an awesome sis. I had some doctorin’ to do yesterday (all day, actually) and she was there with/for me every minute.
Friday is our usual Jake sleepover. We can’t have it tonight and I am sad.
What are your plans for the weekend? Something fun?

All right. Back to the Birdie DVD. Stoney reads RtB and she will know that I am goofing off instead of working. And I’m a-skeered of Stoney. Can I get an Amen, students??