A Thousand Times No

Is a Hello Kitty-themed vacation your idea of heaven…or hell?

If you’re the author of the Hello Kitty Hell blog, it’s definitely the latter.  Our hero, an expat in Japan, agreed to let his wife start selling Hello Kitty merchandise as a source of side income.  Now his life has been overrun over by She Who Has No Mouth.

His wife mentioned that not too many people must be reading his blog, since she keeps seeing the same limited pool of people in the comments.  His reply?

I argued that while there are a core group that tend to comment quite a bit, there are a lot of readers that just read and never comment (I should have added, “because everything is so ridiculous that it makes them speechless” but I was already treading on this ice of being sent to the couch in the Hello Kitty sleeping bag).

Today he announced that they have struck a bargain.  For every five comments he receives on his blog (up to the first thousand), she will donate a piece of Hello Kitty merchandise to a local orphanage in Japan.  Here’s his pitch:

With your help, I have the opportunity to rid our house of 200 Hello Kitty items that will go to a good cause and my wife won’t even be able to complain about it. How great would that be?

Should he fall shy of a thousand comments, his wife has still agreed to donate at a 5:1 ratio of comments to Kitty items.  However, there’s a catch:

She agreed, but also stipulated that if I fail to reach 1000, I have to take her on a Hello Kitty trip this August and I’m not allowed to complain at all (that certainly would be nothing short of Hello Kitty Hell…)

I’m hoping that my reader posse can get a few pieces of Hello Crack sent to the orphans, and perhaps even help rescue this poor fellow from from the Gates of Hello Kitty.  Just visit here and leave a comment, and tell him that Hello Jen says, uh…Hello.

Because there but for my restraint in applying Hello Kitty stickers go you.

Inquiring minds want to know:  Why can’t we have the worst days of the heat waves during the work week, when I’m not sitting at home staring at looming heaps of incomplete housekeeping chores?

On the plus side, I’ve finally figured out how to tag-team an air conditioner and floor fan to bring my bedroom down to a tolerable temperature without blowing every circuit in the house.  The building I live in is well over a century old, and at times I wonder whether the wiring dates back to the Roosevelt era — Teddy, not Franklin.

Meanwhile, it’s been a weekend full of frozen treats.  There was my post-movie ice cream, and then a stop for a coffee-amaretto gelati in South Philadelphia yesterday afternoon.  Tonight, I think the siren song of the soda fountain might be irresistible…

Last night, I kicked back with a couple of my friends for a little “Girls’ Night Out” fun — dinner at the consistently delicious Thai-French restaurant Nan, followed by an opening-night viewing of the big-screen estrovaganza that is “Mamma Mia!”

After the movie, we were in a confectionary mood, so we stopped by a grocery store to make a late-night ice cream run.  Gazing into the freezer case, we happily discovered that Ben and Jerry’s was on sale.  As one of my friends began looking through the flavor selection, she noticed that her favorites were nowhere to be found.

“Oh, just like it is with men,” I hooted exuberantly.  “All the good ones are taken!”

At that very moment, I noticed that there was a man standing behind us who had overhead this entire exchange.  A good-looking man.  A very familiar, good-looking man.

A serious composer whose music I’ve performed, whose wife I’ve heard singing, and whose first name I completely blanked on when I tried to introduce myself.  Hello, I’m an idiot!

This is your brain on ABBA…

My friend Joshua, a documentary filmmaker, recently drove cross-country from California to Hoboken, NJ in four days.  He took photos along the way, aiming for one good shot in each state.  With the exception of Illinois, which he skipped “because it was the middle of the night and it went by so fast,” he succeeded.

I haven’t asked him yet what sort of trip mileage he was able to achieve while driving his Toyota Prius, but I’m sure the gas savings on his coast-to-coast roundtrip journey will be enough to keep him in seed money for a while.

After the College Humor website featured a YouTube clip posted by a geeky adolescent who had made numerous replicas of video game weaponry out of cardboard and duct tape, the “Halo Kid” has been taking the Internet by storm.

It should come as no surprise that I think the kid is terrific.  Those who wholeheartedly throw themselves into making things with their own two hands, from ravelry to robotics, are definitely good by me.  “Obsession,” an acquaintance noted while we were in college, “is a prerequisite for genius.”  (These days he works for Google.)

When I was the same age as the Halo Kid, I was off tearing through every piece of Sherlock Holmesiana I could find.  In retrospect, I see that I barely grasped much of what I was reading.  Many of the nuances of Victorian England were lost to me, as were the types of tiny details that populated the stories like silent, unbarking dogs.  It was the detective’s flair that reeled me in, the obvious drama the center of the lens.

In the many years since then, I’ve learned to take things in with a different eye.  Details I wouldn’t have noticed or understood now pop into clear focus.  So when I first viewed the “Halo Kid” video and was struck by one tiny detail — a bit of un-American activity in the house — I wanted to find out more.

Google is a powerful tool, but it’s no Sherlock Holmes.  (Nor, for that matter, is the old Apple OS search tool Sherlock, which has been transformed into the more aptly named Spotlight.)  At the moment, it won’t tell you the Halo Kid’s name, where he hails from, how old he is, if he has siblings or pets, and so on.  But it’s all there if you know where and how to look.

Hats off to you, K.!  And for all the lame haters out there posting ungrammatical, homophobic put-downs, just remember this: if the Halo Kid grows up to be Iron Man, he’ll have the last laugh.

I got through my presentation today, but I wasn’t pleased with how it went.

• I kicked off with technical difficulties: it took over 15 minutes, along with assistance from in-house AV technicians, for me to get my laptop to project properly onscreen — not a great way to begin a low-key talk on an already unsexy topic.
• Rather than embed sample materials into my slide deck, or work from two machines, I shifted back and forth between the presentation software and several other applications.  This had the unfortunate effect of causing slides to replay from their starting points, even if I had advanced halfway through the slide.
• I began to lose participants before the close of the talk, with several audience members leaving early.  Some of this could be attributed to speaking during the final time slot of the conference, but it’s difficult to imagine that so many people needed to be on planes and trains.

On the plus side, a number of people stayed overtime to continue discussion about the presentation topic.  Oh, and the talk is done!

If I’m lucky, my next presentation will be shorter by at least an order of magnitude.  Right now, that feels like just about my speed.

Two stories in the local news caught my eye today, both of them touching on the use of helmets when riding two-wheeled vehicles.  One described how a married couple in Missouri launched into serious talk about accident outcomes:

Last week, a broken bicycle helmet led Butch and Cindy Grassi, a couple from St. Louis, into a discussion about euthanasia. Butch wanted to fix the helmet but his wife didn’t believe a broken helmet - no matter how well repaired - could provide protection.

Cindy told Butch that if anything were to happen that left her beyond repair, he should know what she wanted him to do, Cindy’s daughter-in-law, Heather Thompson, said.

Cindy Grassi, a St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan, was in Philly last Thursday with one of her friends to watch her favorite team play.  Both she and her friend were critically injured when they were struck by a teenage (allegedly stoned) driver who barreled through a red light after the game.  Her husband Butch learned that she was in a coma when he called her cell phone and it was answered by a hospital staff member.  She died last weekend after she was taken off a ventilator.  Her surviving friend remains in serious condition in the hospital.

Meanwhile, a husband and wife were thrown from a Vespa after being struck by an SUV in the Philadelphia suburbs last Saturday night.  Both of the two are physicians; neither was wearing a helmet.

“Be careful to your head,” a French beau used to warn me in his charming back-translation of “Attention à ta tête!”  Readers, please do keep a fresh, uncracked helmet on your head whenever you take two wheels into traffic, especially if you happen to be riding here in the city with the worst drivers in America.  Your head thanks you, and so do I.

Tomorrow morning marks the formal start of a two-day conference I’ll be participating in for work.  While I really enjoy all the intellectual and professional connections I make at these sorts of events, I’ve been a bit on edge because I’ll be giving a short talk for this one…and I’m not done preparing my slide deck yet.

So you can imagine my relief when I was chatting with one of the major presenters for this conference at the opening reception tonight — someone with one of the mighty animal-cover books to his name — and he said that his day-long presentation tomorrow contained NO slides. YESSSSSS!

As long as people don’t walk out of my talk muttering to themselves that my animal avatar is the mighty WOMBAT (Waste of Money, Brains, and Time), I’ll be content.

This afternoon I went to this month’s Make:Philly meeting, which featured a great talk by kinetic sculptor Brad Litwin (see clip), followed by the Maker Challenge, with small teams working to conceive and execute our own portions of a giant marble-moving contraption.

I don’t know anything about electrical circuitry, and I have no experience with soldering or wiring.  I do, however, know a thing or two about presentation.  So when someone on my team picked a plastic blue Rock’em Sock’em Robot out of the materials bin, and when another teammate brought over a small cowbell, that was just magic waiting to happen.

While another part of the team was wiring together a giant swing arm that could be controlled with a large electrical flip switch, I was trying to figure out how to form a more perfect robot-cowbell union.  Glue gun?  Visions of Martha Stewart, plus permanent deformative markings on the blue boy.  Duct tape?  Secure, but visually inelegant.

I looked across our work table, strewn with all sorts of mechanical odds and ends, and there was the answer.  Zip ties!  I started experimenting with how to snugly loop together our two star players, and found a way to tether the cowbell in the robot’s arms like a giant, upturned basket.

From there, it was a quick step for the team to attach the robot to our swing arm.  The cowbell chimed as the robot “caught” the marble while leaning backwards, and then the swing arm arched him forward, propelling the marble into a giant feeder cone.  (I’m sure each time that bell rang, a code monkey got his wings.)

People loved it.  Rock’em Sock’em Ding Dong was truly the ghost in our machine.

“Oh, the robot and the cowbell should be friends…”

It’s a cliché of American urban life that we say some parts of our cities are like war zones.  But beyond the rhetoric, what does that actually mean?

Here are some numbers.  As of July 10th:

• Murders in Philadelphia in 2008:  166
• American military deaths in Iraq in 2008:  213

Those counts are both already too high, and too close for comfort.  But here’s the twist:

• Murders in Philadelphia in 2007 (through July 10): 212
• American military deaths in Iraq in 2007 (through June 30): 576

Philadelphia’s murder rate has declined during the past year, but not nearly as dramatically as the fatality rate for American military personnel serving in Iraq during that same time.

In other words, there’s a fighting chance that in 2008, there may be more murders in Philly than American military deaths in Iraq.

…I’m speechless.