Disorderly Content

Last weekend was my annual pilgrimage, wherein crazed fans from a surprising number of countries converge on Beautiful Downtown Burbank to celebrate Scaperdom. This was supposed to be the last Farscape convention, what with the show ending production a couple of years ago and the organizers claiming to lose money on the deal. (Which may or may not be true; do they lose money or do they just not make enough to satisfy them? Either one would be fair. I'd just like to know.)

Anyway, since it was to be the last con *snif*, quote a few attendees from prior years made the effort to attend, as did some old and new fans who hadn't yet been Burbanked. The result was that we had a bigger crowd than in recent times. And a good time was had by all; in four days I never managed to turn on the room's widescreen TV or crack open my laptop. Heck, aside from sleeping (which I did little) and showering (which I did enough of, to the great relief of those around me), I spent all my time amid Scapers.

Which made the return to Real Life a rocky one, you may imagine. And the thought that I won't have that experience for whole 'nother year has me bugged. Good thing our Vegas trip is only a month off...

I refer not to real cereal, but to Cereal Killers, which I'm told is an upcoming book. I think Tinkles is my favorite, and not just for its faux 50s color scheme.

The rains abated For a second Saturday in a row. So I took a little drive up to Suisun City to look at the trains at the Western Railway Museum. The museum had been highlighted last year on an episode of Bay Area Backroads, and it seemed like a place I'd enjoy. There's something about trains that appeals to kids, even the overgrown kind. And the great pleasure of this museum is that we get the chance to ride a couple. The major attraction is a few miles of track that's been re-electrified and which runs through some relatively unspoiled hills. They have plans to electrify another five miles or so, which will make the journey even more pleasant. Although I have no complaints; riding in a 1914 parlor car from the Salt Lake & Utah Railroad is a treat, even if it's only a 50 minute out-and-back. Although it did make the run on the museum's 20s Sacramento streetcar something of an anticlimax. Definitely should have done that first.

(I have a few more pictures over on Flickr.)

Back in my college days, we'd regularly make the four hour run to Toronto to visit the Ontario Science Centre, the first hands on museum I'd ever seen. One of the exhibits I remember was a demonstration of speech synthesis. In those pre-PC days (the computer kind; I'm pretty sure political correctness had already arrived), it was all done with dedicated hardware. And the exhibit was a one trick pony, saying the word coffee every time you pressed a button. What was cool was that you could adjust the pitch and the intonation, making coffee either a statement or a question at the turn of a dial.

Thankfully, we've moved on in that area of technology. But what reminded me of those long ago days was a posting on Boing Boing about a Swedish site that will sing whatever message you type. The cool part is that it doesn't use synthesizers. No, it's better; it grabs clips of songs with the individual words and strings them together. Go on and try it; it sounds much better than it... sounds.

Just in time for Halloween, one of my Scaper friends provided a pointer to Making Fiends, a Flash-based cartoon series about... well, that would be telling. Just be sure to watch it with a friend of your own.

Thanks (if that's the right word) to Backup Brain for mentioning When the Graphic Artists Get Bored. I needed to feel talentless and uncreative right about now.

I've gotta bring recording gear to our blogger get togethers. (Can't call them Meetups any more; now that Meetup.com demands actual cash payment for the use of their virtual hall, we've moved to somewhat less convenient but still free options for organizing ourselves. If you're in the SF Bay Area and want to come to one of our sessions, just email me and I'll give you the details. But I digress. Again.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, the recording equipment. Last night's session was the usual: a few dozen topics, some for just a few moments and others in a bit of depth. At my instigation we talked a little about stock photography and about cooking with chiles. (I've been haunting Mountain View's Sunday farmer's market for groceries and subjects for my photography. Peppers make excellent models. And when they're done getting their closeups, they do interesting things to the most mundane dishes. Like a couple of cayenne peppers chopped into my tuna salad; jeepers!) Other people started other conversations, and things rose and fell and transmogrified in all sorts of ways. Oh, and this guy behind us built, tore down and built these art displays on the walls of the coffee shop. Good thing we all had cameras to capture them for posterity.

Yesterday I decided to pay another visit to the San Francisco Zoo. I was hoping the weather would be better than my previous visit. Warmer would be nice; maybe the animals would be more animated. And with not so much gray in the sky. Faint hope, though; right around Daly City things went from bright blue to medium gray like someone had flipped a switch. But I figured I'd press on, since I'd already come this far.

Saved myself five bucks by parking on the street. Got into the longish line to buy tickets, got mine and was all set to walk away when a voice turned me around. Turns out an old friend, her husband and little boy had chosen this same moment for his second encounter with the zoo. So instead of a quick photo expedition, I spent the whole day enjoying the waxing and waning enthusiasms of a five year old. Which made me even more aware of the reactions of all the other children, as when a rather aggressive seagull tried to make off with people's french fries (is it okay again to call them that?) while they were still holding them. Some little kids were scared; others thought it was incredibly funny.

So maybe I didn't get all the pictures I'd intended. But I'm okay with that. And I did get to see the meerkats in the Children's Zoo, a place I wouldn't have gone without a child in tow. Or towing me, as the case may be.

About a week ago I saw a notice in the paper about a promotion Six Flags is doing with Pentax. Just show up at one of their parks on a Thursday between July 7th and August 4th with a Pentax camera and you get in for free! And seeing as how I'm not working at the moment, and seeing how I blew a few bucks on a teeny little Pentax in preparation for my Oz trip in April, I decided a visit to Marine World was in order.

As the name suggests, Marine World started out as a nature park along the lines of Sea World in San Diego, although it transmogrified itself into a more typical theme park just a few years ago. But as I wandered the park today, I realized I was far more interested in the animal life than I was in the coasters. Granted, some of that is due to the sometimes questionable condition of my neck; it doesn't take to bouncing around the way it used to. And granted, when it's a hundred degrees outside, being in the shade with the critters is more appealing than standing on line in the sun. (At those temperatures, even getting soaked on the rapids ride didn't do much to cool me off.)

So maybe it isn't my advanced age. Maybe I just like feeding lorikeets and giraffes and watching butterflies go flitting by. Or maybe it's both. I guess I can live with that.

Today's been a random kind of day. I decided to drive down to Gilroy to visit Bonfante Gardens, a low key theme park whose flowers had given me some good macro photography practice last year. On the way down I listened to a couple of podcasts on my iPod: Coverville, which features interesting (in both the positive and negative sense) song covers; and Lascivious Biddies, the adventures of four musicians from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Both will stay on my subscription list for at least another week.

Arriving in Gilroy, my senses were assaulted by the unmistakable aroma of garlic. Gilroy, you may not know, is the garlic capital of the world, a place Will Rogers once said is "the only town in America where you can marinate a steak by hanging it on the clothesline." Today's just the kind of day he had in mind. The annual Garlic Festival's the last weekend in July. I'll have to miss it this year, owing to my uncle's unfortunate decision to turn 90 around the same time. A pity; I like the garlic festival. Although I won't miss having it oozing out of every pore for two days afterward.

Anyway, on to the Gardens. Parking wasn't a problem at all, a bad sign for a theme park the Friday before a long weekend. But not surprising, given the nature of the place. Bonfante Gardens can't seem to decide what to be. The rides are designed for small children and adults with heart conditions; this place makes Disneyland seem like the height of excitement. The gardens are beautiful and pleasant to wander through. Or at least they would be, if the piped music weren't so intrusive. And the price weren't so high. Almost $40 to visit gardens? Even I'm not that crazy; at least not more than once twice.

As a Marketing person, or at least someone who's had that title, I wonder what they think of as their demographic. Most everyone I saw was either under ten, over sixty, or somebody responsible for someone under ten or over sixty. Doesn't sound like a recipe for success to me.

Feeling particularly bored on this sunny late spring day, I decided to take a drive south. I wandered aimlessly for a while, eventually deciding to stop at Casa de Fruta in Gilroy. I was in the mood to photograph something, and they have a lot of old farm equipment lying around that might do. But when I pulled up to the entrance, I discovered something much better than tractors. Turns out this was the weekend for Civil War reenactors to do their thing. Colorful costumes, rifle fire, cannons. Just like the real thing, except for the death and destruction and the smell.

I put a few pictures up on flickr. Oh, and if you're wondering about the shot at right, turns out that every now and then a cannon blows a perfect smoke ring. A trick, by the way, I never learned in my pipe smoking days.