Travelogue - Portland, Oregon

So, my apologies for not posting much this week.  I didn't even get to do a Flash re-cap, at least not yet.  Wednesday, I jumped on a plane and flew to Portland, Oregon for work.  I'd never been there, and of the many things I like about my current job, it's that I get sent all over the place on someone else's dime.

this was next door to my hotel

A lot of the time when I travel, I just wind up hitting a hotel, eating in said hotel, going to bed, getting up, working, then leaving.  That happens a lot.  But on other trips, particularly when you're meeting with people from all over, you tend to wrap up work and then at least walk around a bit with those folks and grab dinner out and about.

Now, I was only in Portland from 11:00 Wednesday night until when I flew out at 9:00 on this morning (Saturday), so I can't say much about the town.  I was working all day Thursday and Friday, but we did go out for lunch and dinner.  And, yeah, a few of those meals were kind of over-the-top Portlandia-style and fantastic.  We ate at the food trailer area on 10th street and a sandwich shop called Lardo's (I was very happy with my tuna sandwich).  For dinner, we hit a place out in the 'burbs called Old Salt Marketplace, that was a lot of fun, and they made a good cocktail, terrific ham hocks and broccoli.

I won't pretend that I am a Portland expert.  I was barely there.  But it's a beautiful town and they do a lot of things we could learn from here in Austin.  Like, hey, the drivers don't try to run you over.  And you can walk places.  Or take a train.

I stayed in a very nice hotel called The Heathman, where, just to make me uncomfortable, the doorman was dressed as a Beefeater.  I have no idea why and didn't ask.  Then, one of my colleagues who was also on my floor, pointed out that there was a security detail watching the door of another room.  They were just camped out in an open room, watching the door.  So, of course I asked, and the guy said "the reading light is better here" as he sat in the doorway.

I didn't push it.  Never figured out what was going on.  But I did see a lot of very nice dogs in my hotel.

Anyway, an unexpected highlight was getting an email from an old pal from college who moved up there years ago who saw I was staying right near her place of work.  We met up, grabbed some dinner then went to a bar/ restaurant that - you know, 20 years later, it's funny how people still know "oh, Ryan will love this" - was an elaborately Egyptian themed bar that had seen better days maybe 15-20 years ago, and was dead empty on a Friday night.  It was me, Amy, the owners, and a Stan Getz greatest hits album on the PA, surrounded by Egyptian kitsch.  Not another soul around.

If you were to ask me about my ideal drinking experience - buddy, I just had it.  So, thanks, Amy.




  

Bevo XIV Merges With The Infinite

The beloved mascot of the University of Texas, Bevo XIV, has passed.

The University of Texas has had a Longhorn Steer as its mascot for about 100 years, back when it was hilarious to bring a steer to a football game.  And, hey, it still is.

The name of "Bevo" is somewhat shrouded in legend and mystery, referring to a brand of near-beer popular in the early 20th Century, and there's a very complex story about Texas A&M kidnapping the steer back when he was named "Bo" and branding the score "13-0" on his side, which was changed to "BEvO".  I dunno.  It's possibly apocryphal, but I'm not one to fight the legend.

This Bevo has been around for a while.  I believe he was in place way back when we won the National Championship, but I'd have to check.  He's been a good steer.  And, unlike the first Bevo, we won't eat this one (Texas is a hard place, man).

Usually, Bevo hangs out in a sort of open pen on the sideline, drugged just enough (I assume) so he doesn't flip out when the Cowboys spirit group fire off "Old Smokey", the cannon that goes off every time we score.  Secretly, I always want to see Bevo rush the field and clear the whole area, but he's always pretty mellow.

Animal mascots don't last forever.  Texas A&M has Reveille, their cute little dog, and Baylor used to bring a baby bear to games in the 90's (I'm not sure if that's still something they do, but a bear lives on campus).  And A&M has taken exceedingly good care of all their Collie dogs.  But you need to have the character that bridges those generational, animal mascots and be a cartoon.  So, we also have Hook 'Em, which is what you call the character mascot who runs around in a costume whooping it up.  I like both.

We'll miss you, Bevo XIV, but we also know you lived literally the best life a longhorn steer is going to in this world or any other.  We appreciated your service.

Sports Watch: Chicago Cubs and UT Longhorns

Well, this weekend and today have turned out to be just an amazing few days in sports-watching.

This is the first time I have seen Coach Strong smile in a calendar year.

Cubs Win!

I didn't grow up watching baseball.  I started watching it with Jamie's mom.  I think we started watching ball when Jamie was in the hospital and then just because, hey, baseball.  It wasn't my Old Man who taught me the rules of baseball, it was Jamie's mom when I was 20.  They were kind of the team I liked, anyway, because as a kid I'd watch them on WGN mostly because I thought Harry Caray was hilarious.  I was an adult before I found out - literally everyone thinks Harry Caray is hilarious.

Later, when the Cubs played the Diamondbacks when we lived in Phoenix, we'd always go to at least one game, and I really regret only ever making one Spring Training game, because it wasn't all that far from our house.  And, we did make it to a Cubs game or two at Minute Maid Park before the Astros changed leagues.  I'm still trying to plan a vaycay in Chicago next year to make it to a couple of games.  I've only been to Wrigley once, but it was incredible.  I like the new mega-stadiums, too, but seeing the Cubbies at Wrigley was just a blast.

Anyway, the Cubs have been just entirely terrible for most of the last 100 years.  The fanbase, as near as I can tell, has some weird, masochistic thing going on where you learn the virtues of patience and eternal hope, because you never know when this year might be your year.  And, for Cubs fans, it just never is.  

80's Watch: Valley Girl (1983)

I was 11-ish when Valley Girl (1983) hit cinemas, and didn't wind up seeing the movie until circa early 1995 on VHS.  I have almost no memory of that 90's-era viewing, and it wasn't just the case of "Red Dog"we were going through.

Unfortunately, its safe to say that Valley Girl is not a movie for me.  That's fine.  It was never aimed at me as an 11 year old, a 20 year old dude of the 90's nor was it ever supposed to be watched by a 40-something me.

I mostly see the movie as an interesting artifact of the era, but it's not like the movie was reflective of much more than a very regionally specific view into kind of dull high-schoolers with an after-school-special obsession with popularity.  I don't like to use the term "shallow", but if I had difficulty remembering the film, perhaps it's because it's hard to get past the notion that both the main characters and A Plot of the movie wouldn't even really get your shoes particularly wet were you to wade through them.

In 2015, the movie is remembered for three things:

Lagoon Watch: The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)

I quite like the original Creature From the Black Lagoon.  It's just really well shot, has a compelling story, and it is nigh-impossible to beat the creature design.  I just love the way that fella looks.

I'd love to see an updated remake, but when I consider what it'd be like without Julie Adams, well, I have a moment of pause.  And it's that moment of pause that's kept me from ever watching the sequels, two of which I own on a DVD set I purchased at least a decade ago.  But I told myself I was going to watch both sequels this October, because, hey... why not?  I mean, aside from the glaring mistake of not including Julie Adams.

This one image is more or less that whole movie in a nutshell

Alas, we're not here to ponder Julie Adams.  We're here to talk about the inevitable Universal sequel, The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).  Actually, it's the sequel to the sequel, but I watched the damn things out of order, so, there you go.

Who Wants to Live-Watch "Monster Squad"?

Stuart, who kicked off the whole Masters of the Universe live-watch, has pointed out that the 1987 horror/ adventure movie The Monster Squad is now on Netflix.

I'm going to go ahead and pitch the movie as our Halloween Live Tweet Meet-Up.

I'll propose October 23 at 9:15 Central Time for our meet-up point.  I'm travelling on the 16th and figure the 30th will be a little busy for folks with kids, so the 23rd is really the best compromise I can do.

If you've not seen the movie, it's about the mainstays of Universal Horror flicks descending upon a small town in California and the middle-school aged kids with whom they must do battle.  I have extremely fond memories of the movie from when I was a kid and when I saw it a few years ago at the Alamo Drafthouse with a bunch of the cast in attendance.

I'd love to do this one with you guys, mostly because we can all talk about how Jon Gries and Tom Noonan are totally underappreciated as actors.  Also, their makeup in this movie is pretty awesome.  Way better than it needs to be.

Mars Watch: The Martian (2015)

Back this last summer, we read the novel The Martian by Andy Weir, and so it's kind of hard to ignore that fact as we roll into discussing the movie.

On Saturday we headed out to the Alamo to see The Martian (2015) in 3D directed by Ridley Scott and featuring a busload of name actors - headlined by Matt Damon as astronaut Mark Watney.  As one would expect, the movie has some changes from the novel, cuts a lot in order to work as a movie (and for time), and makes some extremely minor plot changes.  But, in general, like a lot of book-to-movie translations of the past decade of newer, very popular books, there's a tremendous fidelity to the source material (funny how it only took movies a century to figure out people liked for these things to match).

Just like the book, the movie is about a Mars mission in the very near future which experiences a surprise weather event which surpasses expectations in terms of severity and thus threatens the crew  NASA protocol insists that the crew scrub, get to their launch vehicle, escape to their orbiting spacecraft, and return home.  As the crew leaves their base, Biologist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is struck by a piece of loosed debris - the antenna - and is sent hurling over a hill, his bio signs offline.  Presumed dead, the crew takes off, leaving Watney on the planet's surface.

Watney re-awakens to find himself alone, with no means of communication with Earth, and supplies in the "hab" will account for only a short amount of time on the planet.  And the lack of moisture, and living in a structure that was never intended to last forever against the Martian environment are just the start of his woes.

The loss of an astronaut is a disaster for NASA, and Watney is given a hero's funeral, but within days, a staffer at NASA notices evidence of Watney's survival on satellite photos of the base and things back at NASA and JPL go into overdrive.