(no subject)
Oct. 28th, 2003 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
usernamenumberI'm in Greenville, Texas now. It wasn't until after I'd landed in Dallas, as I was walking under the giant statue of a cowboy roping cattle suspended in midair above the car rental booths that I remembered this was my first time back since I was a kid. I was born in Texas, in Port Arthur, which is nowhere near Greenville. I guess that's why I didn't find myself immediately awash with nostalgia or anything.
Driving through Dallas at night was interesting. At the risk of sounding trite, I have to say that big cities at night do look gorgeous. That otherwordly, this-is-the-future vibe that I get from them really does something for me and the fact that Dallas is all about skyscrapers lit with neon green pinstripe outlines and highways lined with gaudy billboards did little to discourage the impression.
Greenville is basically a string of motels and restaurants strung alongside Interstate 30. It's most annoying feature is the fact that there is no civilization to speak up in the surrounding area and so there has been little percieved need for things like overpasses or even exits for long stretches of highway. As such, if you miss your exit you tend to find yourself driving for a good 5 or 10 extra minutes before you can turn around. I've ended up doing this more than once and it's the most frustrating thing in the world. My dad was impressed when I told him I was going to Greenville because it was a town in Texas that he'd never heard of. I think for a moment he must have thought that I'd made the whole thing up, but apparently he looked up Greenville on the net. He called me a few days before I left to suggest that I visit the Audy Murphy Cotton Museum, which he assures me is the most happening place in town.
So, this week I'm teaching an onsite for what turns out to be a defense contractor of some sort. I'm answered in only the vaguest terms when I ask what they do here and I have to have to be escorted by an employee at all times when I leave the classroom. When I went to use the photocopier, someone went with me. When I went to have lunch, one of my students walked me to the cafeteria, ate with me and then walked me back to the classroom when I was done. On the bulletin board near the cafeteria's exit were posters about reporting suspicious activities, the importance of counter-surveilance and so forth. Everyone was very friendly, but I kept remembering the shotgun I'd noticed casually propped against a wall in the guard building where I got my visitor's badge that morning.
One last thing about Greenville:
I keep meaning to get some super-portable digital camera that I can take with me on my "travels". One of the best reasons I've seen so far is the restautant next door to my motel: "Ninja's Steak & Sushi House". Sounds cool, huh? But I ask you, if you ran a restaurant called "Ninja's", what would your logo be? I'm thinking some sort of, you know, ninja, yes? But what does this place have? A bright yellow sign with a badly drawn turltle in a chef's hat, sitting right there next to the word "Ninja".
...WTF??
Anyway. Good news: my rental car has XM radio. Woo! XM is great because it has fewer commercials, good quality, tons of stations and you can access the same stations from wherever you are in the US. Right now my presets are:
1. Stand-Up Comedy
2. Old Time Radio
3. The 80s Station
4. The 90s Station
5. Opera and Vocal Music
6. BBC World Service
Old Time Radio!! 24 hours a day!! So wonderful!!! I grew up fortunate enough to be within range of a radio station that played reruns of Jack Benny, George and Gracie, Charlie McCarthy and Dragnet every sunday night. I'd record the shows each week and listen to them over and over all through late elementary school and early middle school. Then I taped over most of them with transfers of my Iron Maiden LPs. *smacks forehead*. I've always been especially fond of the comedies. I listened to an episode of the Bob Hope program (sponsored by, I kid you not, "evaporated milk!") this morning and felt sad for all the people who wondered what the big deal was with people when he died. I'm not sure what it is that makes me love the sci-fi and suspense dramas. The corny writing, the ummm.. over-enthusiastic score.. if I was watching them on TV I doubt I'd be able to stand them for more than five minutes. But there's something about the medium of radio that makes even the corny brass fanfare that punctuates every "startling revelation" in the stories fascinating. The episode of "Suspense" that I just listened to actually had a good twist at the end that I hadn't seen coming, which was especially nice.
Well, it's late, I'm tired and I just started Harry Potter #6, so off to bed with me. My dad recently mailed me photocopies of the memoirs of a relative of mine (my great grandmother's sister, I think-- but I could be remembering wrong). They were handwritten in the mid 60s and recount her times growing up in rural Mississippi in the late 1800s. Really fascinating stuff. I'll post more on about that later.
Driving through Dallas at night was interesting. At the risk of sounding trite, I have to say that big cities at night do look gorgeous. That otherwordly, this-is-the-future vibe that I get from them really does something for me and the fact that Dallas is all about skyscrapers lit with neon green pinstripe outlines and highways lined with gaudy billboards did little to discourage the impression.
Greenville is basically a string of motels and restaurants strung alongside Interstate 30. It's most annoying feature is the fact that there is no civilization to speak up in the surrounding area and so there has been little percieved need for things like overpasses or even exits for long stretches of highway. As such, if you miss your exit you tend to find yourself driving for a good 5 or 10 extra minutes before you can turn around. I've ended up doing this more than once and it's the most frustrating thing in the world. My dad was impressed when I told him I was going to Greenville because it was a town in Texas that he'd never heard of. I think for a moment he must have thought that I'd made the whole thing up, but apparently he looked up Greenville on the net. He called me a few days before I left to suggest that I visit the Audy Murphy Cotton Museum, which he assures me is the most happening place in town.
So, this week I'm teaching an onsite for what turns out to be a defense contractor of some sort. I'm answered in only the vaguest terms when I ask what they do here and I have to have to be escorted by an employee at all times when I leave the classroom. When I went to use the photocopier, someone went with me. When I went to have lunch, one of my students walked me to the cafeteria, ate with me and then walked me back to the classroom when I was done. On the bulletin board near the cafeteria's exit were posters about reporting suspicious activities, the importance of counter-surveilance and so forth. Everyone was very friendly, but I kept remembering the shotgun I'd noticed casually propped against a wall in the guard building where I got my visitor's badge that morning.
One last thing about Greenville:
I keep meaning to get some super-portable digital camera that I can take with me on my "travels". One of the best reasons I've seen so far is the restautant next door to my motel: "Ninja's Steak & Sushi House". Sounds cool, huh? But I ask you, if you ran a restaurant called "Ninja's", what would your logo be? I'm thinking some sort of, you know, ninja, yes? But what does this place have? A bright yellow sign with a badly drawn turltle in a chef's hat, sitting right there next to the word "Ninja".
...WTF??
Anyway. Good news: my rental car has XM radio. Woo! XM is great because it has fewer commercials, good quality, tons of stations and you can access the same stations from wherever you are in the US. Right now my presets are:
1. Stand-Up Comedy
2. Old Time Radio
3. The 80s Station
4. The 90s Station
5. Opera and Vocal Music
6. BBC World Service
Old Time Radio!! 24 hours a day!! So wonderful!!! I grew up fortunate enough to be within range of a radio station that played reruns of Jack Benny, George and Gracie, Charlie McCarthy and Dragnet every sunday night. I'd record the shows each week and listen to them over and over all through late elementary school and early middle school. Then I taped over most of them with transfers of my Iron Maiden LPs. *smacks forehead*. I've always been especially fond of the comedies. I listened to an episode of the Bob Hope program (sponsored by, I kid you not, "evaporated milk!") this morning and felt sad for all the people who wondered what the big deal was with people when he died. I'm not sure what it is that makes me love the sci-fi and suspense dramas. The corny writing, the ummm.. over-enthusiastic score.. if I was watching them on TV I doubt I'd be able to stand them for more than five minutes. But there's something about the medium of radio that makes even the corny brass fanfare that punctuates every "startling revelation" in the stories fascinating. The episode of "Suspense" that I just listened to actually had a good twist at the end that I hadn't seen coming, which was especially nice.
Well, it's late, I'm tired and I just started Harry Potter #6, so off to bed with me. My dad recently mailed me photocopies of the memoirs of a relative of mine (my great grandmother's sister, I think-- but I could be remembering wrong). They were handwritten in the mid 60s and recount her times growing up in rural Mississippi in the late 1800s. Really fascinating stuff. I'll post more on about that later.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-10-29 04:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-29 11:48 pm (UTC)Whatever it's supposed to be, I don't get it.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-30 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-29 04:55 am (UTC)PErsonal favorite was the X Minus One presentation of the odl Bradbury(?) story, The Nursery. I was so thrilled when I realized that I had read some of the stories these old shows were based on.
Meanwhile, in other dork news...
"That's a bloody awful lot of ships."
no subject
Date: 2003-10-29 01:48 pm (UTC)I've got a boxed set of "Radio Sci-Fi Classics" that I've had for about 3 years now. It's got X Minus One, Arch Obler (who jms says he admires greatly) and a couple of others. Unfortunately, I still haven't listened to the whole thing yet. *sigh*. Must fix that.
Tee-hee. Lizbeth and I just watched "Vorlon tabutna chog!" last night. =:)
no subject
Date: 2003-10-29 05:03 am (UTC)digital cameras won't be on par with film cameras for many years to come, so i wouldn't bother spending extra money on something with more megapixels or a fancy lense. if you got a little cheapy web-oriented model for under $100 that should serve your purposes just fine. another option, if you want to be able to manipulate images and print them without seeing compression or pixels in the prints is to get a scanner. you can scan your prints and/or your negatives and save them as TIFFs (no compression) if you wanted to do that. even if you save them as JPEGs the image quality is going to be better than if you were using a top of the line digital SLR.
if you just want to post internet pictures of your travels, you should be able to find something in the $50 range.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-29 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-29 05:04 am (UTC)2) harry potter -6-!!??!! is that what those contractors are doing? you had better mean five, or i'm coming to texas.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-29 01:41 pm (UTC)/me tries and fails to think up amusing lie about being part of the Harry Potter beta testing team...
oops.
Sorry, I meant 5.
Yeesh. According to my mailbox, I have 3 more replies waiting. I bet they're all calling me on that. =:\