29 June 1998: The Heat Breaks

Monday, 29 June 1998:

The Heat Breaks

Things cooled off to the mid-80s today, and more importantly, the humidity broke after a mild rainstorm mid-afternoon. It's nice enough that I turned off my A/C; I'd much rather be a little warm with the windows open and three fans going than perfectly comfortable inside the ice box. Part of this is because I like to give my cats things to see and smell.

After I wrote my entry last night, I went for a walk along Lake Monona for a bit. One thing that struck me (other than the bugs) was the vast quantity of spiders with webs on the railing along the pedestrian bridges on the John Nolen Causeway. It was staggering; there must have been hundreds, of all different sizes!

I bear no ill-will towards spiders (probably man's best friend among the "small crawly things" family) but a lot of spiders - or one big spider with a huge web on my porch - is a little much.

One pleasant by product of the heat was to learn how well my car's radiator is still functioning. I guess the mechanic guys were right when they said that they thought I was just having problems with the thermometer. At least it seems unlikely that my car will overheat and explode this summer.

Work today was okay. It was (I admit) gratifying to see one somewhat-thankless assignment get turned over to someone else. I know, I don't get stuck with all the crummy assignments, but this was one which seemed almost likely that it would go to me. (Maybe it would only be thankless to me, since it mostly involves territory that I've covered in much detail in the past, learning-wise, whereas it's fairly new stuff to many of the other developers.)

After work I read a couple of Prince Valiant collections I've been slowly working through (Bud Plant Comic Art has been selling some Fantagraphics overstock at less than half cover price, so I've been taking advantage), and went down to the Union terrace to read. I biked down, which was nice in and of itself, and basically read until sunset.

With the All-Star Break looming, I'm basically ready to give up on my fantasy baseball team for this year, since I'm still mired firmly in last place, by a wide margin. Oh, well. It'll give me time to devote to other activities. I'll have to decide whether I want to play again next year, though. I think the peak of my baseball fanaticism has run its course.

I'm reaching convergence on my random reading. I'm plowing through this Prince Valiant stuff, I pushed last night to finish the 36 issues of The Question comic book I bought a couple of months ago, I still have a volume and a half of Pogo to read, and my stack of unread comics is dwindling quickly. Best of all, looking at my bookshelves it seems like I now own more books that I've read than that I haven't. It's unusual for me to find, say, a solid block of books by multiple (alphabetically-ordered) authors, all of which I've read. I can find several such, now.

I guess this means it's time to order more stuff, huh?

Sitting on the terrace has made me realize that I no longer feel like a contemporary of today's college students. There's something going around the Internet about how today's college freshmen are pretty much aliens to many of us: They don't know what vinyl records or 8-tracks are, do not remember a world without MTV, probably file Star Wars under "classic" films, and have probably been using personal computers since high school, if not earlier. (I started using computers in junior high, but I was unusual in that way.) All of this is fairly true, albeit in an oblique way.

I now officially find many of these people "young". I'm not sure which kind I find stranger: The ones who still seem to regard life as one big party (in one fashion or another), or the ones who are self-aware and self-confident and are not at all intimidated by people older and more experienced than they. I actually work with people in both of these categories.

It's particularly strange to think that if I met a seemingly-compatible woman in this age group (say, 22 or younger), I would hesitate to pursue anything in part purely because of the age gap. I think I see now a little of what a couple of the women I've dated have thought about me (every woman I've ever dated has been my age or older).

To paraphrase something my friend James S----- (another on-line journalist, incidentally) once said, age isn't the best measure we have for evaluating other people (in fact, it can be downright annoying and/or wrong), but sometimes it's the best measure we have.

I guess I'm all set to enter old-fogy-dom now, though.

I think I forgot to mention that while I was in California I watched the season finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I used to be a huge Star Trek fan, but the wretchedness of The Next Generation drove me away from the show. I've watched hardly any Trek in the last four years.

SPOILERS FOLLOW.

This episode, which involved the Federation launching a major offensive against the Dominion in Cardassian space, was the sort of lame-o episode that really bugs the heck out of me in Trek. The whole space battle was trite and contrived (despite approaching Babylon 5 in its special effects sophistication): How convenient that the defense platforms were all powered by a central source. How lucky that the Defiant, in a wave of technobabble, could cause the platforms to turn on their power source? How interesting that one of the major villains could simply teleport onto the station, murder an officer, and not be detected at all until after the fact. (Funny, you'd think this technology would be used a lot more often!) Interesting also that Captain Sisko could basically walk away from his job (and, apparently, his lover) on a moment's notice.

Aaagh. Looks like I made a good call to give up on Trek. (Of course, you'd think that the similarly-weakly-plotted movie First Contact would have persuaded me of that already... not to mention the abysmal "Dinosaurs" episode of Voyager. Ack.)

Michael Rawdon (Contact)