Author: colter

“That’s My Uncle Colter. He’s Cool.”

Those were the words of my nephew Austin to a friend of his as I walked by them and into my grandmother’s house in Harrison yesterday. With nothing planned for my Labor Day weekend I figured I’d drive home for a day or two. I left Sunday monring around 10 and soon realized…I’m a dog owner now[1]. I can’t just leave for a couple days without making arrangements for her care. Cats are easy; give them a pile of food and a litter box and they’re good for 2, maybe 3 days. The dog is not so easy. DeLaine called me on the road and reminded me of that. So I came back early this morning, praying that Zoe had not left an enormous puddle of urine on the kitchen floor. She hadn’t; the house was absent of any vengeful reprisal for my 24-hour absence. My short trip was enjoyable, however, as I had lunch with my friend Becky and we wandered aimlessly around the area in search of unusual photographic subjects (new plog soon). We also went to see “Red Eye,” which was surprisingly good. I had dinner with the family and hung out on my sister’s porch with my mom. As a combined Christmas and birthday gift to the two of them, I’m taking them to see The Rolling Stones in March.

Saturday was enjoyable as well. Kathy accompanied me to my gig in Hot Springs, which went swimmingly.

I learned an important lesson driving home this morning. If you’re going to drive south during the mid-morning hours for a couple hundred miles, wear sunscreen on the left side of your face, neck and arm. On a clear day you’re essentially getting blasted with sunlight. I wore a shirt on my head for the last half hour of the trip. Bleah.

1.) Technically “dog guardian,” as Matt will be back for Zoe sometime; I just don’t know when.

Funny Story

Here’s something funny to take your mind off the worst natural disaster in US history. About a year ago I bought Death Cab for Cutie’s “Transatlanticism” for $3 in a pawn shop in Hot Springs. I listened to the first few tracks and thought, “this doesn’t even sound like a band, this is electro-dance insanity with drum machines and synthesizers everywhere – this is the band everyone’s been talking about?”

So I put it away, thinking maybe it was their experimental freak-out record or something. It stayed on the shelf until last week when I saw a video from that record on my Comcast “On Demand” service. It did NOT sound like the CD I heard, so I put the disc back in my car for a second listen. I turned it on today and heard something very familiar. The Faint. In the intervening months since I bought the CD, Jamie had turned me on to some tunes by the Faint, so I knew what they sounded like. I pulled the disc out of the player, and it’s one of those damned discs that record companies just decorate and don’t tell you the title or artist. I did notice the label was Astralwerks. I did a Google search on some of the lyrics just to be sure, and it turns out I did indeed buy a copy of Danse Macabre by the Faint. That’s what I get for buying $3 CDs at Boll Weevil Pawn in Hot Springs.

The Doctors Khan Update

For anyone who knows them, Adnan and Kelly are OK. They weren’t in New Orleans last weekend at all, they were in Tulsa for a wedding. They’re at Adnan’s parents’ house in West Little Rock. Reports are that their place near Tulane isn’t waterlogged, but there’s likely treefall damage and the possibility of looting.

Even the constant network news coverage of the damage doesn’t convey the devastation like this video does. And this video only covers Gulfport and Biloxi.

Katrina and the Waves

OK, sorry but I’ve actually been hoping for some TV news organization to make that crummiest of puns, and so far they haven’t given in to the urge (although admittedly I haven’t watched much of the coverage). Surely The Daily Show will be back to do it. Anyway here are some choice Flickr postings to check out:

Various scenes from Louisiana and Alabama
Pictures from above the eye
Deserted New Orleans before the storm

Update: The Times (UK) succumbed to punnery!

Weekend Update

I had a marvelous time Saturday running errands with Katherine. We went to Target and Barnes & Noble and bought more than we probably should have. I went to Target to get a portable CD player, but Katherine got hooked on a quest for some elusive, magical pants. Ordinarily the women’s department is not the kind of place I generally enjoy visiting, but Target makes the job so much more amusing by virtue of its wide selection of cartoon-emblazoned underwear. Am I the only person that thinks putting Bert and Ernie on panties is just a little disturbing?

At Barnes & Noble I picked up the new Steve Martin paperback, The Pleasure of My Company. I finished his last book, Shopgirl, recently and I highly recommend it. The movie will be out soon, starring Martin, Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman. Hopefully it will do the book justice. It would seem a fairly unfilmable story given that there’s only the slightest quantity of dialogue to be found in the book. Perhaps it will be tone-poem-esque in its delivery. That would rock. It would make a great silent film.

Superflux played a gig that night at Arkansas Blast, a car stereo competition. It’s amazing to me how many people will put more money into their cars than their residences; and it’s doubly amazing to me what people consider fashionable and attractive in their modes of dress. I don’t say that to be snotty; God knows my fashion sense is just a couple rungs above Bob from Tom the Dancing Bug, but some people truly believe that Def Leppard are paragons of fashion.

Cintra Wilson Goes to Washington

The Queen of Literate Snark, Cintra Wilson, has a lengthy piece in Salon about her recent embed in the White House Press Corps. There are many fine quotations, but this was my favorite, attributed to an anonymous conservative reporter on the topic of slippery Press Secretary Scott McClellan:

“You get frustrated, and you think it’s like nailing mercury to a wall, and then you realize that it’s not because Scott is so masterfully evasive, but because the White House declines to provide any mercury, or a wall.”

I have to contrast this to another quotation, this one from Helen Thomas:

“The press has a duty to find out the truth…if we fall down on the job, the people suffer. [The Bush administration] doesn’t think the people have a right to know, but we know they do. You can’t have a democracy without an informed people.”

Given the characterization of McClellan from someone within his own party, I’d say democracy is either dead or just extremely sleepy.

Brief Thoughts on Iraq

Some things that have been running around in my head this week:

  • The map of Iraq was drawn by the British, who probably had no idea what they were doing in terms of the ethnic/religious population divisions of the region.
  • Often the only type of leader who can make a country like that work is either a strong, unifying leader (Marshal Tito of the former Yugoslavia) or a completely brutal dictator (Saddam Hussein).
  • Can democracy be brought to such an artificial state of warring religious factions? The only way democracy (or any style of government) works is if everyone agrees on it, and agrees to put aside their differences in the name of a common goal. Right now I don’t think the people of Iraq have a common goal. Otherwise there wouldn’t be people running around shooting ice salesmen because Mohammed didn’t have ice in his time.
  • Is it possible that people like Saddam Hussein and The Taliban are the only people who can successfully maintain order in such divided nations?

An old friend of mine from high school, Allen Harris, has been recently deployed to Iraq. Previously he was stationed in Alaska. He’s gone from frozen hell to burning hell. He writes:

It’s usually about 110 degrees by 1000 every morning, hitting a high of about 120 by afternoon. That doesn’t count the heat radiating back of the desert floor, making it feel like about 130-135. It sucks. I can’t say which is worse, they both suck about as equally, just on the opposite ends of the spectrum. You don’t want to be outside for very long at -60F, and you don’t want to be outside for very long at 120F. We try not to do much in the afternoon unless we have to. Where we are going next, further north, is about 5-7 degrees cooler, not as sandy and open, and hopefully starting to hit the cool months.

Note to self: No longer will I complain about the Arkansas weather.

Official Declaration of Vacation

I bought my tickets. Now it’s for real. In September I’m flying to California for vacation. I’ll land in San Francisco and be guided about by my friend Erika who works north of the city in the wine country. Then I’ll rent a car and drive down the coast to LA to meet up with my cousin David and hopefully my friends Tracy and Mary. I’m hoping to catch Chris Poland at The Baked Potato on Thursday the 22nd and Jon Brion at Largo on Friday the 23rd. Other than that I have no real goals other than to be some place else and find interesting pictures to take.

Noah Baumbach Update

Periodically I check in on Noah to see what the writer/director of one of my alltime favorite movies is up to. Lately it looks like like his website is down, but I did find this amusing piece he wrote for The New Yorker. I’m not sure of the context, but I’m assuming he’s comparing Tom Cruise to an overeager (and yet statistically knowledgeable) canine. Funny stuff. Rewire the pronouns and add lots of scratching and it probably sounds a lot like Zoe‘s inner monlogue.