In LA

Illustration courtesy of the site "twittercounter".

The title of this post is a little misleading. It should probably read,”On my twitter popularity; In which I compare my number of followers to that of the stars in heaven and, on finding the comparison unfavorable, decide twitter popularity an unwholesome pursuit. This I’d follow with a few choice Icarus references and the exclamation that I prefer to keep my feet firmly planted on terra firma.”

I’d have gone with that as this post’s title, but it would not fit into twitter’s 140-character limit.

I’ve not only just purchased a restaurant supply pack of three 1-liter bottles of my favorite salad dressing, but I am having it sent to me here in Michigan while working on location. As if that doesn’t already sound a little extreme, I also made the purchase as a “subscription”¹ at Amazon, so that the price drops another %15, and an order will automatically be placed for me every 6 months².

If you’ve never had Annie’s Naturals Shiitake & Sesame Vinaigrette, and you like your salad dressings savory and tangy, I’d highly recommend giving it a try. Once you’re addicted, the most economical way to satisfy your craving is the aforementioned 3-liter pack at Amazon.com.. Your supermarket likely has the 8oz bottles for around $4ea, or 50 cents an oz. My seemingly insane purchase gets the price down to about 20 cents an oz. Cheaper than water! I might just drink the stuff straight for the first week after delivery. The second week it’ll be on the rocks.

Suffice it to say that I eat a lot of lettuce and other tortoise-approved foods.

1. I can cancel it any time I want to. I just don’t want to. [↩]
2. which is about how long it’ll take me to get through 3-liters of the stuff. [↩]

On my drive to work this morning I noticed that the sky and large plant-like things at the sides of the road were freakishly pretty and lush.

I finished my first solo drive to work without incident, and entered the editing room. As you can see, our editing room is no different than most feature film editing suites. Editors tend to like to work in the dark. Click the photo to see it at higher resolution.

After a day of work, the editor and I had dinner at "Sneakers Sports Bar". The bar had served the previous night as a filming location, and we’d visited late to watch a bit of the shoot. I think 10% of downtown Lowell might be visible in this photo. People can still smoke in bars in Michigan, so there was a nostalgic hint of cigarette in the air. Lowell is locked in perpetual battle with Disneyland’s Main Street for the title of smallest and cutest urban center.

Our waitress had worked at Sneakers for 20 years, yesterday she played a bartender in the film. I asked if her name was "Koko", as I was about to order "Koko’s chicken". She laughed and said no, and pointed to the menu item above my choice, which features her name. Rocky or Roxie or Rose… When I next eat there I’ll be able to pretend I’ve remembered her name simply by finding it in the menu.

You know when your food looks like this that you’ve entered the midwest. This here is "Koko’s Chicken". It was pretty tasty. Carb joke redacted. Anyone else as tired of making carb jokes as I am?

It’s my day off. Let’s see what’s on TV!

White coated folk (human and non) hawking medical miracles:

White robed (and non) folk hawking miracles:

Fitness miracles:

Financial miracles¹ :

Class action for those not happy with their miracles:

Someone ran out of actual history to cover:

1. A joke: How do the people who make such fake news reports sleep at night? Answer: On pillows made of money! And I suppose on bedframes of bone strung with the intestines of those who still trust anything said on Television. [↩]

Posted via web from Zachary’s posterous

When one searches for anything on Microsoft Bing that has the potential to be related to anything that can be bought, sold, or processed, the search engine presents several links to commercial related items at the top of the search results, often emblazoned with the ‘Bing cashback’ icon to indicate that the item can be purchased at a discount by finding it through Bing. I thought the following commercialized Bing link was rather interesting:

Any guesses as to the subject of my initial search? Here’s a hint: the search was completely unrelated to gender reassignment surgical procedures, but it does warm my heart that on such operations a person might receive a Bing cashback percentage return. Thanks Microsoft!

At right is an image with a little more context, in which you can see my query and the placement of Bing’s interesting little ad. Click it to see it full size.

The flight from MSP to GRR was on a small jet. It was a short flight. I met a native grand rapidsian, and she gave me sone tips on things to see while in town.


The safety card illustrations on that plane were particularly arty. I especially liked the supermodel-ish facial expression of the woman in the ocean, using her seat cushion as a flotation device. A “Blue Steel” moment.


And there was something atmospheric and peaceful about the floating baby in the next panel, like an illustration out of “Goodnight Moon”.

I’m now in Grand Rapids, at a hotel. Time to sleep and to dream of flotation babies.

The flight to Minneapolis was delayed, and switched to some recent model Airbus. Ah look at that sink. Someone at Airbus Put a lot of effort into that lighting scheme, and the faucet’s controls.


After i’d finished admiring the facilities and had stitched together my first airplane bathroom panoramic photo, I attempted to return to my seat. I say attempted, because the mother and cute toddler seated next to me had fallen sound asleep in my absence. It took 5 tries to wake her enough for me to get past so that I could become wedged once again between her and the wide-shouldered teen on the other side. This guy was not exceptionally large, he just happened to be slightly edging into football player range. His shoulder was constantly pressed against me.

I understand the need to fit large numbers of people onto planes in order to increase capacity and control costs, but I don’t think that this particular plane is large enough to have 8 seats across (2 on each side, 4 in the center).

I think it’s time for airlines to explore new options. I’d be happier to lie down for the course of a flight. Think how many passengers could be packed in more comfortably if everyone was horizontal, and there were several layers of ‘em stored within the same space that now supports one layer of people; masses cramped and folded into indeterminately seated positions –unable to recline enough to relax. If such an option were ever adopted, it’d be best to make sure the illustrations on the safety card didn’t resemble certain 18th century engravings of certain types of human cargo vessels.

During the flight I watched ‘Adventureland’, which was a reasonably mature comedy. I was a little put off by the fact that the lead female character was supposed to be extremely great and cool but this was expressed as a function of her appreciation of the lead male character’s qualities rather than that it be due to her own intrinsic merits. Then again, that’s the virginal boy to studly man heartfelt comedy genre for ya. I appreciated this one’s ambition. It could’ve use a few less montages, set to 80’s rock ballads, of somber teens staring out windows; But that problem didn’t start with Adventureland. To address the issue one would have to send a terminator back through time to disrupt production of a few Cameron Crowe films and maybe Lost in Translation.

Arrived late to MSP, but my next flight was delayed, so there was no rush. I walked around the Nazi Supporter Terminal¹ and took a panorama of a line of shops. At right can be seen a downsized version of The Mall of America. Why would anyone build a tiny store themed after a mall that is famous only for being extremely large?


The clouds outside the airport’s windows were fantastic. Its rare to see dramatic stormy skies in LA.


The image above is a stitched image composed of several photos I shot while traveling along a conveyor belt, one of those flat escalator things. They probably have an official name. Stitched panoramas are typically made from one nodal point around which the camera is rotated between shots. To do otherwise introduces all sorts of errors in the result. I was hoping these errors would be interesting.


I ate airport Chinese food and charged my iPhone at the same time. The boost in battery power made the food taste better.

My cousin Andy was all set to drop by the airport for a brief visit, but I figured with his travel time and my time going back through security, we’d barely have time to say hello. So I talked him out of it. With any luck I’ll have a longer stopover on the way back.

1. MSP has a terminal named after Charles Lindbergh, who I hear was an anti-Semitic Nazi supporter -are there other kinds of Nazi supporter? [↩]

The shuttle picked me up at 8:25. After tying up loose ends and packing a bit, I fell asleep around 4am. The sooner I can get on that plane and nap, the better.


Traffic heading South on the 405¹ approaching the 10, at around 9am, was ridiculously clear and fast.


I checked one bag, which cost me $20. I thought it might have been over the weight limit, but it was almost exactly at the limit of 50lbs (3.5 stone). I rarely check luggage these days, but I don’t think I’d want to bring only a couple shirts and one pair of pants for a 3-month trip.


The abbreviation for Grand Rapids (international?) airport is “GRR”. That’s incredibly cool. I wonder why more airports don’t adopt whimsical abbreviations.


I arrived at the airport 2.5hrs before my flight, and then the flight was delayed 40 minutes. So there was time to stop for a delicious and nutricious breakfast of carbs with barely-flavored high-fructose corn syrup as a condiment. In LA, such a meal is an act of defiance.


And now I wait for boarding. With any luck I’ll have enough time at Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport (An airport which desperately needs a new nickname. I can’t even pronounce “MSP”.) to hang with my cousin Andy for an hour.

1. or “I-405″ for you non-LA-residents. We drive so much that our freeways have nicknames [↩]

Posted via web from Zachary’s posterous