A Clarification on a Name

Many peoiple feel like we named our son Cassius as an homage to the late boxer and activist, Muhammad Ali, who viewed his other name as a slave name: Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.

We actually decided on the boy's name before Ali died, and while we never found out our baby's gender, we had conversations for far longer on girl's names. We both liked Cass, "Ca-shuss" and "Cass-ee-us" as pronunciations and use all three with regularity.

But Ali wasn't the only inspiration.

I liked the heritage of the Cassius moniker, dating back to anti-despot Epicurean philosopher, military leader, and politician Gaius Cassius Longinus:

Most famous as the main instigator in the assassination of Julius Caesar and one of the villains in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar", his legacy is one of strict adherence to rule of law and to oppose dictators in all forms.

And then there's the OG Cassius Marcellus Clay:

This Cassius Clay was an abolitionist and served as Lincoln's ambassador to Russia during the Civil War. Clay having the ear of the tsar put Russia in position to help out the Union: Russia threatened to declare war on France and the UK if they sided with the South.

Herman Heaton Clay, the child of former slaves, named his son Cassius Marcellus Clay, after the abolitionist, who in turn named his son after himself, and the rest is history...

2016 Nearly Over

Many people have taken to calling this year, 2016, some form of catastrophic adjective and even coming up with silly hashtags about it G(ing)TFO.

I was never really a Bowie fan or a Prince fan or a George Michael fan, But Ali was an inspiration, and Carrie Fisher and her mom, Debbie Reynolds, dying within a day of each other was storybook bizarre.

And those were just the deaths that came to the top of my head as typed this. So much death...

And our country's quick slide back to regularity with the election of president Orange Roughy.

But for us, 2016 was pretty freaking great. We have a beautiful son now, and at this time in 2015 we didn't, and that has definitely shaded our view of this year by any measure.

And the Cubbies won the World Series!

Here's a quartet of some of the better material from this year:

1. Conferences: Vacations That Aren't
2. WonderCon 2016
3. Our Biggest Adventure Yet
4. What Have You Done for the Cause Today?

One's about a yoga retreat, one's about a comic convention, one's about the baby, and one's about my late grandfather.

Happy Turning the Page! Happy Life!

Happy Old Year!

Happy New Year!

A Chair's End

(or)

Eighteen + Years with a Second Owner

The last of my grandmother's chairs have finally left us.

After living in the dorms, I moved into an apartment with Tony and furnished the place with my late grandmother's furniture: a couch, two chairs, two marble-top end tables, a wooden hexagonal doored table, and two brass lamps. 

The effect of all that legitimate furniture, all of it already close to 30 years old, was to make our little apartment the most home-y out of all of those in the Jungle, the nickname our section of those shitty apartments had.

When I moved into the Oceanaire house with Tony and Ryan, I brought all that same furniture. The couch was the first to be destroyed/replaced. We had three couches in our living room, and two throne-like chairs set up for our drinking game, Caps. One of the throne chairs was one of my grandmother's chairs. After four years of being basically a drinking hammock, it was worse for the wear and obviously shabbier when compared side-by-side with the other chair, safely tucked away in my bedroom. The couch lasted only a few years. Both chairs made it to our own place before we left town.

In Brooklyn, Tuxedo chose the Caps chair as his scratcher of choice. By the time we left, all that cat-scratching and Caps-playing had taken its toll and that chair didn't make the move to Texas.

After Texas and a half-decade in California, getting another cat, having a baby, and the general falling-apart of gear, the other, formerly pristine Oceanaire's-bedroom-chair, has met it's final demise:

I'm not sure how long my grandmother had the chairs, but I'm guessing close to thirty years, and then I had them for another eleven and eighteen, respectively. 

We considered having it re-upholstered, but very few people seem to know how to do that anymore. Eventually it had fallen too far apart to be taking up as much valuable space as it had.

The lamps, marble-top tables, and hexagonal table are all still around.

The end of a sitting era in our midst...

Saturnalia Celebrations and Magoo Memories

Corrie and I aren't particularly religious, and don't really celebrate Saturnalia in the traditional-Christians-hijacking-the-12/25-day manner.

Corrie does quite enjoy the traditional pagan activity of taking some nature and bringing it into your home, and decorating it with lights and whatever shiny baubles you may have (which in our case is very few---baubles, that is).

So we bought a tree.

A huge Douglas fir. This sucker is eight feet up of bushy pine smell, and probably fatter at the base than it is tall. It's quite spectacular.

We were getting it all set up last night and she put on a time-appropriate video:

My mother could see right away that it is "Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol."

Magoo's Christmas was a household tradition in my family, and I've seen it many times, and have varied memories of it.

Those memories all came rushing back as we listened and worked--I realized I haven't watched it multiple decades.

What follows are the impressions I had as a child and less my impressions now as a film cricket theorist. I synced them up with pictures.

1. Magoo is a blind idiot:

This scene of him driving against traffic used to piss me off an unreasonable amount. Not only can he not see, he's oblivious to everything. I remember immediately disliking this Magoo person.

2. The sound effects stuck with me. Remember the "knot untying whistle" noise or the "mistaking the fat guy for the turkey poke" noise?

3. The sound of Jacob Marley wailing was the scariest sound I'd ever heard when I first encountered it:

4. Young Magoo/Ebeneezer's song, "A Hand for Each Hand", was the saddest thing I'd ever encountered anytime I heard it---up until "Lilo and Stitch."

5. I remember both my mom and my Auntie Peg singing along with the criminals after they cashed in the dead Magoo/Ebeneezer's gear in the future:

6. I remember not having a sense of humor about the ending, after the scenery comes crashing down on the director, thinking, "Shit. That guy has to be dead. How is that funny?"

Decemberween is upon us in Long Beezy...

Some Firsts

I have gone to what may amount to be an unreasonable amount of colleges and for majors that are quite thinky. Also, I have worked for many years in blue collar environs and readily identify with working class people. My background is a strange mix of intellectualism and working class ethos, the kind of guy who can do grunt work for ten hours and then come home and work on a new kinematics system to replace Newton's. (And that's how I spent the summer of 2003, by the by, trying to figure out why cubic Hz's are everywhere at night after days setting tile.)

While I've never been in a position of controlling any real amounts of capital to be considered bourgeois, and I'd firmly self-identify as proletariat, I find it funny that Corrie and I had this problem the other night:

Baby's first quinoa.

He smashed it into the table and into the folds in his hands and wrists.

But "Baby's first quinoa" is a decidedly bourgeois situation.

For full disclosure: in my time working in restaurants in Manhattan, the first time I saw quinoa written on our prep lists I incorrectly pronounced it "kwi-noa" before being corrected with a respectful "keen-wah."

I also thought salisify was a verb, like to "salsa-fy" something, before being corrected: "salsa-fee" is a light-ish root vegetable.

We recognize the inherent problem with just handing the Boy some food to gnaw on. He mostly can't get anything into his mouth, but he looks so longingly at us while we eat. I think only banana has made it into his mouth at all. Most make it onto his face.

We ordered some blender heads for our busted hand mixer and await their arrival.

Working Weekends

As the year comes down to crunch time, I think back to a working Saturday two months ago. Sometimes it feels like it was just the other day; other times it feels like it was last year. 

It was held in a building in downtown LA that was also a studio, as the hallways were wall papered with the posters of their movies and television shows ("Liar Liar" was easily the biggest and most prestigious production for which they were responsible.)

I took the train, because that's what I do. Drive? Are you kidding me? Look at the traffic down the 110 at quarter-to-three on a Saturday:

It's moving at least, right? Slowly...

The travel fun didn't end their. Walking back to our place from the Long Beach stop, my path was mildly obstructed by the filming of some production of its own. They were letting locals walk past quietly on the sidewalk, and when I made the other side, I wheeled around a snapped a picture, trying to not look like an a-hole with a phone.

Judging by the two cars, one pristine old brown Benz with a joke vanity plate and one Benz shell of the same color with both camera and light mountings, this was a movie shoot.

This weekend has been in the forefront of my attention as the initial work to be put in based on what we learned there is coming up soon.