Ryan's Journal

I’m pushing for Kerry pretty hard in this election, but it’s not because I’m a staunch democrat — if the election was Kerry vs. McCain I don’t know who I would vote for — but because I think George Bush is a terrible, terrible leader. He seems like a nice guy, but he’s a very bad President. I’ve been absolutely baffled as to how anyone with any intelligence could support him — the arguments put forth on pro-Bush web sites and on right-wing talk radio are so blatantly one-sided or else based on false information (“Saddam orchestrated 9/11”, “Kerry will raise taxes on the middle class”) that I can’t believe anyone of even moderate intelligence would fail to see through them. Tonight, however, I stumbled on Andrew Sullivan.com, which is written by a staunch Republican who actually makes reasonable arguments. I disagree with him on many points, but for once I can actually sort of understand a Bush supporter’s position.

So my brother calls me tonight and tells me that he’s going to the Dave Matthews Concert. I scoff, and tell him that I checked, and Dave isn’t coming to California anytime soon. To prove my point, I go online and discover that there is a free concert in Golden Gate Park on the 12th (which is of course now sold out) and a concert near Sacramento tomorrow. Ticketmaster and their concert notification service can bite my white butt, ’cause I didn’t know about either of these.

Upon hearing that there’s a concert tomorrow Aaron was immediately in full-on “I’m going” mode. I warned him how the last time he went to see Dave Matthews without me his girlfriend got sick and practically puked all over him, but he wasn’t dissuaded. Left with no other option, I made a quick call to the boss, did some magic on iflyswa.com, and now in about twenty hours the Holliday boys will be jamming along with Mr. Matthews and friends. At some point I’m told that I’m going to grow up and become responsible, but until then it should be a heck of a ride.

Sadly there has been nothing of interest to write about lately. The daily routine right now consists of getting up at 7:30, working until 8:00 or 9:00, either going to the gym or else reading a bit, and then (hopefully) falling asleep at a reasonable hour. I have the lifestyle of a seventy year old while still only twenty-eight.

Also, from the soapbox, if you live in a state where your vote is going to matter (which sadly excludes all but a handful of states), please make the effort to get out and vote for Kerry. Practically every issue that matters to me has been trampled by Bush, and yet he stands a good chance of being given four more years to continue. His record on the environment? The past four years have been horrific, with everything from logging in the guise of fire suppression to attempts to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Fiscal responsibility? The deficits are at a record due to the tax cuts and uncontrolled spending. International relations? Anti-American sentiment is as bad as it’s probably ever been. Morality and values? The country is the most polarized it’s been since the sixties, we’re in the midst of the dirtiest election campaign I can remember, and personal liberties are being attacked in this country (see the Patriot Act) and abroad (see Abu Gharib). Bush seems like a nice, well-meaning guy and all, but I don’t see how four more years of his leadership could be anything other than a disaster.

Went to my ten year high school reunion in Cleveland this weekend, which was a ton of fun but also rather surreal. Everywhere I looked was someone who kind of looked like someone I used to know, but in this case they actually were the person I used to know. A highlight of the reunion was receiving an award for following up my “most likely to win a gold medal” accolade as a senior by getting beat eight years later by a 66 year old woman in the San Diego marathon — next time I’m definitely not going to fill out the pre-reunion questionnaire.

Aside from seeing Caitlin, Amy, Rob, Chris, and the rest of the gang, I got a chance to talk to a lot of other people that I hardly knew during high school. For some of those folks we were just filling an awkward moment where we happened to be standing near one another, but for others I really enjoyed the conversation and regretted not having known them better. And of course, with most of the old group of friends it was like nothing had really changed — before even saying hello to Rob we were giving him crap about his parking, and the group at Tommy’s quickly glossed over the obligatory “where are you and what are you doing” questions and launched into the more important matters of how many milkshakes and brownie monsters we should order.

Another thing that was weird about coming back was all of the things I didn’t realize I missed. People have a lot more space in the Midwest than they do in the cities of California, and everything is really, really green. In addition, stuff like Bob Evans, seeing people smoking in public places, and the Duck Pond’s killer attack geese induced a weird sort of deja-vu/nostalgia that I hadn’t been expecting.

Today I slept in and drank a ton of coffee to work off the slight hangover, then met up with some of my college friends who I hadn’t seen in years. Now on the flight home I’ve got my first airborn celebrity sighting as I’m sitting two rows behind Kevin Smith (aka Silent Bob). All in all a great weekend.

Here’s a poor attempt to show what the Warner Brothers lot is like (satellite photo courtesy of http://terraserver.microsoft.com/).

• Most of the big white squares on the left are soundstages.
• The “Big” soundstage is the thing that you see just before the Warner Brothers logo in the movies. It has the same footprint as the other soundstages, but is considerably taller.
• Slightly less than half of the stages have regular shows that film in them — Friends (now Joey), ER, West Wing, Gilmore Girls, Two and a Half Men, and a few others I’m probably forgetting. Most of the WB network shows shoot at a separate lot that is about a mile down the road.
• The soundstages that aren’t used for TV shows are usually either empty or else used for whatever movies are filming (at the moment Ocean’s Twelve is using three stages).
• The outdoor sets cover a big chunk of the east side of the lot and include everything from ER’s County General Hospital to a row of brownstones to the New York alley that the Spider-Man upside-down kiss was filmed in. They’re used nearly every day for whatever is shooting that needs an outdoor setting.

Fifty-two days to go…

Scaled Composites has posted a video of Mike Melville’s flight into space aboard Spaceship One. Compared to the sterile formality of a NASA flight, it’s pretty cool to see a pilot tossing M & M’s around the cockpit just to watch them floating in zero gravity.

I’ve been trying to avoid politics in this journal, but this article by Ronald Reagan’s son perfectly summarizes every reason why the Bush administration scares me.

On the tendency of the right-wing to label anyone who questions the President as either a liberal or un-American:

“It’s one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe wackos.”

On the way the administration changes its justifications to suit the moment:

“They may have ideas worth discussing, but they don’t welcome the rest of us in the conversation. They don’t trust us because they don’t dare expose their true agendas to the light of day. There is a surreal quality to all this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we’re in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we’ve got him; we’ll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we’ll be there for years to come.”

It’s a well known fact that attractive women can use their hotness for good or for evil. It’s also well known that the likelihood that a woman will use her hotness for evil is directly proportional to how much hotness she possesses. Today at Kinko’s a woman came up to me who was so far off of the charts that the thought “I need to come to Kinko’s more often” actually flashed through my head before my idiot filter was able to stop it.

She wanted to borrow my cell phone since hers had died and the person she was meeting at Kinko’s hadn’t shown up. Knowing that evil was imminent I was on my guard, but since I had no where to be I handed over the phone, and watched for the next twenty freakin’ minutes as she argued with her boyfriend. Judging solely by her looks I had expected that she might either steal the phone or else use it call in a bomb threat or something somewhere, so being able to just sit around and wait for her to finish was in a weird way almost a relief.

“I’m George W. Bush, and I approved this message; in fact, I think it is awesome.”

From an essay by Paul Graham:

“The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don’t learn anything from them. Writing a compiler is interesting because it teaches you what a compiler is. But writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn’t teach you anything, because the bugs are random. So it’s not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems. It’s more a question of self-preservation. Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid. Good hackers avoid it for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers.”

Ocean’s Twelve (the sequel to Ocean’s Eleven) is filming on the lot right now, and while I’m not generally the movie star stalker type it’s impossible not to be curious about a film starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta Jones, Don Cheadle and Bernie Mac. They’re using three gigantic soundstages for filming, there are more than twice as many movie star trailers parked on the lot than I’ve ever seen before (each with a nametag of “Linus”, “Danny”, “Rusty”, etc), the sets look to be huge, but sadly aside from knowing that Matt Damon’s car is much, much nicer than mine, and that George Clooney is apparently driving a souped-up Honda motorcycle these days, my lunchtime strolls have otherwise not been very informative.

Site’s back up — a power outage knocked out the router a couple of weeks ago, and this is the first weekend I’ve been back in the Bay Area to fix it.

The SAG union contract is an amusing read. The last clause, “If an Background Actor is rigged with any type of explosive device (including squibs)…” is particularly well-done.

ESPN today named Cleveland fans as the most tortured fans in all of sports. No disagreement here, although I’ll still swear to the fact that God himself came to earth in the form of Bernie Kosar, accompanied by the angels Newsome, Brennan, Minnifield and Dixon.