BeatBearing project.

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Dunno why, exactly, but it's cool and I want one. Just 'cause.
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"Peter Bennett, a PhD student at the Sonic Arts Research Center in Belfast, made this sequencer that you program with ball bearings. It has four tracks: kick, snare, hi-hat, and cowbell."

Whatever. I still want one. (And My birthday's coming up. Just saying.)

Take a deep breath...

Although there are those who would disagree, we here in the Northeast are really no different than the rest of the nation. We have traditions that we hold as dear as anyone; we shiver through little league games in the spring, we grill way more beef than is actually good for us in the summer, and we spend our crisp autumn afternoons raking leaves while being serenaded by the ear-splitting roar of our neighbors leaf blowers. You know, Americana at its prosaic finest.

The winter though, provides an annual activity that’s even more stultifyingly banal: the “oooh-they-say-it’s-going-to-snow-but-we-don’t-know-how-much- -so-lets-all-speculate-ourselves-into-a-flather-over-nothing” tradition. Which, as of this very Sunday morning, has been going on for days. And days and days.

Well, here’s my response to the all the Chicken Littles out there, both of the professional meteorological and amateur variety: Tonight, it will get dark. Then it will snow a little bit. Tomorrow I will shovel that snow (while being serenaded by the ear-splitting roar of my neighbor’s snow blowers), and then I will have some hot chocolate and some lunch. And that’s all that’s going to happen. (Now granted, this prediction is based more on demonstrable experience than irrational hysteria, but I guess that’s just how I roll.)

So in short, if you feel that you may be one of those people prone to getting the vapors and creating drama over things you can’t control, please do us all a favor and save all that energy for something really weighty that’s also out of your hands. You know, like presidential elections or the Rapture; something idiotic like that. Thanks.

Addendum: Monday 1/14, 11:50 a.m.

So after all that, this is a picture of the “snow” we got from last night’s “storm.”

I just knew my chosen profession should have been meteorology, since it seems that neither competence nor accountability are required. =Grrrrr...

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Waaaaaaa...

Ok, I don’t really have anything to say, it’s just that I stumbled across this picture this morning and I love it too much not to share.

(Although I suppose it does go perfectly with what O’Reilly had to say about his latest Obama kerfuffle:, “No one on this earth is going to block a shot on The O’Reilly Factor.” ,The whole earth?, Really?)

Anyhoo, enjoy, and have a nice day.

An open letter to everyone who made a New Year's resolution to get healthy:

Hi. ,How are you? ,Good. ,So, it’s nice and all that you’ve decided that this is the year that you’re going to lose weight and get healthy. ,Yes yes, I know, you all want to look better and feel fit. I understand. But here’s the thing…, why did you have to join my gym?

I mean heck, not only are your extra cars making parking a freakin' ,hassle, but now most of the Arc Trainers are taken in front of the good TVs. ,How, I ask you, am I supposed to do three miles without the History Channel? ,No no, I can’t just “move to the treadmills,”, because over there is the television-land ghetto in which the only choices are Fox News and perpetual reruns of Becker on TBS. ,Blech.

So, yes, you stood there on New Year’s Eve with a flute full of champagne and a forebrain full of good intentions, but now it’s time to let all that go. You know you want to. It’s hard to stay motivated to get to the gym all the time. And it is, after all, time consuming, a lot of work and kind of boring. Well, more so if you have to watch Becker, but you know what I mean.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if I want you to remain the lazy sack of cheese that you are, ,per se... ,it’s just that I think you need to decide if my gym is really right for you. You could, after all, just stop being a tightwad like me and join the New York Sports Club right across the street. I’ll bet they have fancier bottled water. And their scale probably works too. Just a friendly suggestion.

Oh what the hell... ,go for it, I guess. If you really are ready, then more power to you. I suppose it won’t kill me to make an extra circle or two around the lot.

So now I'm both old and uncool. Oh well.

So what is cool and who gets to decide? I suppose it’s a hopelessly subjective question;, cool is obviously in the eye of the beholder. I guess age also has a lot to do with it:, toddlers think mom is cool, fourth graders think snot is cool, and teenagers, depending on the day, think either nothing or everything is cool. People my age, however, seem to think it’s cool to go see It’s a Wonderful Life in a real theater with friends and family.

So that’s just what a small group of us did this last weekend at the Lafayette Theatre in Suffern, which is one of the rapidly diminishing number of original vaudeville houses that have been saved and still show first-run movies as well as “classic” films. On Saturday, though, they did a whole holiday thing, that included a Laurel and Hardy silent short accompanied by a Wurlitzer-organ-playing-guy, and a reading of A Visit From Saint Nick which was followed by, go figure, a visit from Saint Nick himself. You know, an actual fat guy in a red suit., Dopey? ,Sure, but the kids ate it up. I’d have preferred a few Rockettes myself, but that’s a different story.

Anyway, the main feature was It’s a Wonderful Life, which I, (and, as it turns out, much of the audience), had never actually seen from beginning to end. And yes, I know it’s a movie that has managed to polarize the masses like no other; ,some people love it with the same sort of blind allegiance they feel towards puppies and rainbows, and then there are those who feel waves of maudlin-induced nausea just thinking about George Bailey and Bedford Falls.

I of course fell firmly in the nausea camp, if only because I’m usually a curmudgeon and proud of it. ,(I occasionally consider myself smug bastard as well, but I usually save that for special occasions.) , Anyway, as you’ve probably already guessed, seeing It’s a Wonderful Life on a big silver screen while surrounded by cheery, unassuming folks really does make all the difference, and before I knew it the snow was falling in Bedford Falls, George was back with Mary, and I was sniffling along with everybody else.

All right, so there’s nothing cool about it, but it’s still not a bad way to spend an afternoon. ,And I got to see Santa, so there.

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Smartosity.

There’s a lot to be said for the holiday season: the smell of fresh cut Christmas trees, the crunch of new fallen snow underfoot, that special acid reflux that’s unique to eggnog with rum… ,really, it’s an endless cornucopia of sensorial treats when you think about it.

Even better though, as any parent will tell you, is that adding kids to the mix not only lets you hand down those cherished holiday traditions, but provides an excuse to create new ones. ,(Traditions, not kids. Although creating kids is fun too, if you like that sort of thing.) ,Anyway, what was I going on about? ,Oh yeah, new traditions. ,So…, yesterday we not only put up our tree and trimmed it with the usual jumble of shiny, but I also took the opportunity to play Mr. Science and showed the boys how to use a little bit of science foo to de-tarnish the silver ornaments.

To wit: ,rather than slogging it out in the trenches fighting the tarnish on it’s own territory with polishers and such, we simply dropped the ornaments in some hot water with a piece of aluminum foil and some baking soda. It’s the nuclear option, if you will. So, two minutes and an electrochemical reaction worthy of Beakman later, all that unsightly silver sulfide had jumped ship and made it’s way over to the aluminum foil in the form of aluminum sulfide. Fickle stuff, that sulfide is.

So there it is, a new kind of holiday tradition; ,one that celebrates brains over brawn, or as we say around here, good old fashioned smartosity. After all, if I raise my kids to value braininess properly, maybe they’ll stay away from the eggnog.

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P.S., Speaking of cutting xmas trees... , anybody have a good cleanup solution other than ,$&#ing turpentine? ,This year our tree was sappier than a Nora Ephron movie... ,yuck.