Month: February 2002

As you’ve undoubtedly heard, the nominees for the “2002 King County Noxious Weeds List” were announced earlier today. This year it looks like a real horse race — I don’t think we’re going to see a single weed sweep all the major categories this year, as Giant Hogweed did in 2001.

Overall I think the nominations are a good bunch of choices, although I must admit I’m surprised that Garlic Mustard is up for Best Noxious Weed (I though it was pretty good but ultimately didn’t live up to the hype) while Velvetleaf got snubbed. It’s also disappointing to see those weeds which bloomed early in the year get almost completely overlooked. This is only going to perpetuate this cycle where weeds bloom as late in the year as possible — sometimes blooming just briefly in late December before going dormant and re-emerging later in the following year — in an attempt to stick out in the Weed Board’s notoriously short memory.

A couple of things make this year’s nominations stand out. Last year, you’ll recall, there were some mutterings about the lack of diversity in the nominations, and, perhaps in response, this year we see an Italian nominated for best Thistle, as well as the Syrian Bean-caper for Best Shrub. The nomination of Bighead Knapweed is also curious — almost no one thinks that this weed deserves to be nominated on its own merits, and this is seen mainly as an acknowledgment that the genus Centaurea is long overdue for an award.

Well, I guess we’ll find out in March who the 2002 winners are. I understand that Whoopie Goldberg will be hosting this year’s Noxious Weeds ceremony, which is too bad because I though Steve Martin did a great job last year and I would have liked to see him return.

The bad news is that I am terribly, terribly behind at work. The good news is that time flies when you are in a perpetual state of borderline panic due to impending unmeetable deadlines.

I love superhero comic books, even though I never read them. I used to be a voracious comic book reader back in junior high (my favorite title at the time, for reasons I can’t for the life of me recall, was “The Flash”), but at some point my interested waned and I went cold turkey for about a decade. Then, while I was in Bolivia as a Peace Corps Volunteer, my girlfriend (now my wife) sent me the first issue of Untold Tales of Spider-man. I think she sent it more as a joke than anything else — it was just thrown into a care package along with a lot of other Americana reading material, Entertainment Weeklys and the like — but she sent me every single issue thereafter, right up until the series got axed at issue #25. Later I discovered the real reason she had been buying them: she had read issue #1 before sending it to me — perhaps the first comic books she’d ever read — and had herself got hooked on the series.

The writer of that series was Kurt Busiek, and, since then, I have gotten hooked on another of his projects, Astro City. The Asto City stories have been collected into a number of trade paperback editions, and if you have any interest in the genre at all I’d highly recommend picking up Life in the Big City. Very enjoyable.

Recently I discovered this remarkably unsettling page devoted to Busiek. It’s written by one Darren Madigan, an aspiring but frustrated comic book writer who knew Kurt in college and once carried (and seemingly continues to carry) a torch for his wife. It begins with a short and snarky message that Madigan posted to a newsgroup, and continues with a reply from Busiek himself. Then, in response to this 12-paragraph rebuttal, Madigan weighs in with a six-page screed, in which he analyzes Busiek’s response line-by-line — and often word for word — and seasons liberally with hyperbole and fat jokes. I read the whole damned thing; it is truly fascinating in its awfulness.

And don’t forget that Defective Yeti is your Official Olympics Apathy Station. So stop by often for breaking, up-to-the-minute news on who could not possibly care less about this historical event.

Have you seen the trailer for John Q? Have you seen it dozens of times? The first time I encountered it, several months ago, I turned to my wife and said “Wow, we gotta see that.” And I meant it at the time: the premise was intriguing, the star (Denzel Washington) is amongst my favorites, and the direction — from what you call tell from a trailer, which admittedly ain’t much — looked pretty good.

All of that is still true, but I’m afraid I can no longer see it. Why? Because John Q has run afoul of my Movie Trailer Ubiquity Rule; to wit: “If the total amount of time I have spent involuntarily watching a movie’s trailer equals or exceeds the running time said film, it shall be removed from my Must See In Theaters list.” I’m not sure of the exact running time of John Q, but I’m betting it’s less than the approximately seven hours worth of “John Q” trailers I’ve seen thus far. Sadly, the MTUR prevents me from seeing Rollerball as well, so you’ll hafta let me know how it is.

Best. Alkaloid. Ever.

Jeezum Crow: you leave town for a few days and what happens? You come home to find people flying around on personal jetpacks, that’s what!

Well, I’m back from Canada. I had gone there to attended a five day Datafax Users Group Conference, which was colloquially referred to as “DFUG,” which sounds to me like a mid-century dance or a word a junior-high school student would use in place of an expletive. Essentially, it’s one of those deals where a company sells you a product, and then they hold these conferences where you pay to go and learn how to use the product. Good work if you can get it.

The conference was held outside of Montreal. I’d love to give you the low-down on what life is like in Eastern Canada, but, frankly, I haven’t the slightest idea. Upon arriving at the airport we hopped in a shuttle and drove straight to the conference site, which was tucked away in the countryside surrounded by number of ski resorts numbering roughly one infinity. Our hotel was one such resort, the Fairmont Tremblant, and was a literal snowball’s throw away from a skilift. Nice for the skiers in the crowd, no doubt, but a tad brisk for those of us convinced that we mammals evolved war-bloodedness for a damned good reason. The upshot to all this is that the atmosphere of the joint was much more ski-lodgie than it was Quebecian, so any report I tried to give on the lives and habits of Eastern Canadians would conclude that they have a brewpub on every corner and a serious Gore-Tex fetish.

Still, French was the first language almost everywhere you went, so that was an interesting change from my norm. I’d walk into a restaurant and the host (or, as they say in Quebec, “maitre’d”) would approach and say “bonjour”. And then I would point to myself and say “AMERICAN! NO PARLAY FRENCH!” and he would say “Right. Table for one?” and that would pretty much end my cross-cultural experience. Although I did still have the option to watch tv in French. They had, like, a dozen stations: a third in English, a third in French, and a third originally in English but dubbed. This last category was actually the most fun, as you could watch “Tout le Monde Aiment Raymond” or listen to The Simpsons banter in French. (Marge: “Ce n’est pas un singe.”; Homer: “Le D’OH!”).

The accommodations were guilt-inducingly sumptuous. My room was so large that, had pushed the two twin beds against the wall I could have played raquetball in there. And the housekeepers had apparently been trained by the Special Forces, because I couldn’t go get a Coke from down the hall without returning to find the beds made, the towels restocked and the end of the toilet paper folded into a lethal point. Plus, I also had the best of all possible views: right outside my window was the beginner’s ski hill. It was like having a 24/7 feed of “Quebec’s Funniest Home Videos” at my disposal.

Anyhow, I had a good time. But I’m glad to be back in a state where most thermometers have no need for a minus sign.