About Wyrd Smythe
The canonical fool on the hill watching the sunset and the rotation of the planet and thinking what he imagines are large thoughts.
This is a companion piece to yesterday’s post about my high school English teacher, Mr. Wilson (which may—or may not—be his real name). This piece concerns something that happened in high school that changed my life. It’s one of those moments when you turn onto a new road that ends up becoming a permanent part of your path. As we say these days, it rebooted my life.
The road turn took place in 1970, but the first real seed was planted the year before. It was my first year of high school, and I went to see a play, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, put on by the high school. The play was staged in the school’s auditorium, a 1000-seat genuine theatre complete with fly galleries, lighting positions, and a booth at the back for projectors and the main spotlight.
It was the first time I’d seen a live play or a theatre like that.
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23 Comments | tags: Cloris Leachman, drama, Ed Asner, high school, lighting guy, Mary Tyler Moore, theatre, theatre lighting | posted in Life, Writing
(Not Mr. Wilson)
I’ve spent so much time today reading and commenting on other people’s blogs (and a few on my own) that now I’m feeling a bit weary of writing. Still, we’ll see how this one goes. It’s a combination bone to pick (albeit a small and arguable one) and remembrance of things past. Distant, dim past. High school past. Nearly forty years past.
I’ve been remembering the past for a variety of reasons. A high school friend, one of the very few I’m still in touch with, is also facing looming job elimination.
And just yesterday, someone else from high school sent a message to my Facebook page (which I maintain for the purpose of old friends finding me, and only for that purpose).
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12 Comments | tags: Chaucer, classy, English class, high school, Mr. Wilson, Neil Gaiman, Sandman, unique | posted in Life, Writing
This is actually a comment response that ran so long I decided to post it as a new article. It’s in response to a comment from wakemenow on my Venus & Mars post yesterday.
I’ve heard many a tale about the competition among women. There have even been some articles published in work-related blogs about women in business being far harder on other women than on men. I’ve long assumed it was primarily based on competition for a resource (position, power, money) that was viewed as scarce, but I have come to wonder if there isn’t something else at work as well.
This is a fairly fresh line of thought, so bear with me if it seems poorly thought out (or just flat-out wrong).
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15 Comments | tags: Ana Marie Cox, competition among women, group betrayal, inner voice, women | posted in Life, Philosophy
Had a pair of interesting dreams I want to record. They were odd enough to stay with me once I awoke, and interesting enough (at least to me) that I want to record them. They seem possibly related to my current job situation.
(NOTE: This post is intended more for me — a true web log — than for any putative readership, so you may not find it very interesting. This is your one and only warning!
Continued reading may lead to a why am I reading this syndrome!)
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4 Comments | tags: Cousin Itt, dreams, Morticia Addams, retirement, work | posted in Life, Writing
When I wrote the first rant about television commercials over a year ago, I promised I would return to the subject repeatedly. Better late than never, here’s another entry towards keeping that promise.
As I mentioned last time, I’m not a big fan of marketing and advertising. Of course companies need to market and advertise their products.
It’s the way they go about it that I sometimes (in all honesty, make that frequently) find repulsive.
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1 Comment | tags: Arbys, AT&T, commercials, Klondike bars, McDonalds | posted in Rant, TV
As fall slowly falls upon the region, the smell of wood smoke is in the air. Much as it evokes great times around countless camp and bonfires, the smell has been strong enough recently to really set off my sinuses. Two nights in a row (wait: sniff, sniff… make that three), it was less the fragrance of wood smoke and more the acrid nostril-irritating stench of wood smoke.
An age-old metaphor for life, perhaps.
Too much of a good thing isn’t a good thing.
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8 Comments | tags: Adobe Reader, cargo cult, creativity, luck, motorcycles, success, wood smoke | posted in Brain Bubble
A while back I wrote about Yin & Yang and how some opposites are truly opposing (positive and negative) while others are actually the presence and lack of a thing (light and dark, for example). In that article I cited men & women as being genuine opposing pairs, as you can’t consider either one the absence of the other.
That, understandably, generated some comments. Many would not choose to see women & men as being opposites at all, but as two variations on the theme of human. I think that is absolutely correct. Our two human sexes have far more in common than they do in opposition. (And note that gender is a different concept than sex. Gender is about how your mind works, about who you are; sex is about your genetic code.)
And yet… Anyone who lives in the real world knows that the “Mars & Venus” thing has some substance.
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7 Comments | tags: duality, friends, lovers, men, women, Yin and Yang | posted in Basics, Philosophy
Before the age of blogs (or even web pages), those of us on the internet had other places to hang out and exchange thoughts.
In fact, in many regards, the “Bulletin Board Systems” (BBS) and “internet news groups” (USENET) were more conversational than blog or Facebook comments. They were more like chat rooms where conversations took place over days and weeks (and months).
Like chat rooms, they involved a group of people having a conversation. I miss those days… blog comments are too brief and passing to be a conversation. At best, brief remarks are exchanged for a half-dozen rounds or so, and then the river flows on.
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2 Comments | tags: Borg, Captain Picard, Star Trek, The Next Generation, transporters | posted in Life, Sci-Fi Saturday, TV
Okay, any Star Trek fan knows that Gene Roddenberry invented the transporters so he wouldn’t have to deal with the special effects necessary to show a landing every time the crew visited a planet. It also cut out any time needed to show the launch, travel time or landing, and that moves the story along. Both of those are smart and good, so let me start by saying, “Gene, that was awesome! And so is the horse you rode in on!”
There’s also the simple fact that, in science fiction, you have to grant a few “gimmes” in order to tell the story you want.
The canonical example here is warp drive. Do you want to explore strange new worlds, and seek out new life and new civilizations? Well, you’re gonna have to find a way around Mr. Einstein, who laid down the Universal Speed Limit, a little thing we like to call c.
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7 Comments | tags: Dyson sphere, Earl Gray, it's green, Picard, Realm of Fear, Relics, replicators, Scotty, Spock Must Die!, Star Trek, transporters | posted in Physics, Rant, Sci-Fi Saturday, TV
This has been a stick in my craw since the earliest days of the original Star Trek series. This one way predates my notorious Holodeck Hatred. And there is no hyperbole when I say “earliest days” because we’re talking about the third Star Trek episode ever aired, Where No Man Has Gone Before.
(While this was the third episode aired, it’s actually the second pilot, which is the one that got the show on the air. Did you know we can thank the great Lucille Ball for that? Read the linked Wiki article!)
The stuck stick is none other than the [big space voices] Barrier At The Edge Of The Galaxy (the BATEOTG, or maybe you prefer BatEotG).
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Leave a comment | tags: galactic energy barrier, Loretta Swit, Margaret Houlihan, Star Trek, The Naked Now, The Naked Time, Where No Man Has Gone Before | posted in Rant, Sci-Fi Saturday, TV
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