UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Tonight I made some updates to my portfolio page, and it got me thinking back to all of the projects I’ve worked on over the years, going back to my first professional web design gig right out of college in 1996.

Wowee-zowee. I really can’t believe this is still up. It was one of the last websites I designed at that first job out of college. The site went up in the fall of 1998, just before I left California to move back to Minnesota (the first time). It’s kind of shocking to see that the site doesn’t seem to have changed one bit… even the poor-quality digital photos I took with a then-state-of-the-art Apple QuickTake 100, the first digital camera I had ever seen, at the opening day of the Los Angeles County Fair in 1998 are still there (and promoted on the home page as if they’re hot news).

I remember that day as if it were yesterday. First off, let’s get some perspective. There are just shy of 10 million people living in Los Angeles county. That’s almost twice as many people as in the entire state of Minnesota. I wouldn’t necessarily say that that means the LA County Fair is twice the size of the Minnesota State Fair, because the Minnesota State Fair is disproportionately huge. But the LA County Fair is friggin’ huge in its own right, especially for a county fair. I recall standing in line for 2 hours in sweltering late summer heat just to get through the ticket booth, and I was wearing long pants because I had come straight from work and hadn’t really anticipated this turning into an all-day affair. Once inside, I squeezed my way through the teeming throngs to the appropriate exhibition hall, only to discover that it, too, was friggin’ huge, and I had no idea which booth CDW was in. Eventually I did find the booth, but Lenny (wonderful, wonderful Lenny) was nowhere to be seen. So I took my pictures and left.

OK, I guess that’s kind of a lame story. But that’s what I was up to ten years ago.

But wait… that’s not the only decade-old site I built that’s still essentially intact. There are many, many, many, many, many, many, many more.

Quite a legacy I left behind in California, no?

Wow, the things you discover on the Internet. It all started out so innocently. I was just trying to locate a photo I saw once before. It was of a one-lane road, in Germany I think, with a security arm. There were no barricades on the sides of the road though, not even a curb, and you could see in the photo a well-worn path in the grass median next to the arm where cars had simply driven around it. A great metaphorical image.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember where I saw it. It was a couple of years ago. So I resorted to just trying whatever keywords I could think of in Google and hoping for the best. No luck. I was thinking it might have been on a Demotivators poster, so I added that word to my search. I still didn’t find it, but I did find a page devoted to testimonials from “recovering Mormons” regarding their former church’s practice of requiring its members to wear special undergarments at all times (even in the intimate company of their spouses). This is the kind of seemingly ludicrous (to an outsider) practice that you occasionally hear about regarding “other” religions and think they must be jokes concocted by detractors. And yet, it turns out to be true.

Now, I can certainly understand the church’s (less than noble, in my opinion) motivations for imposing this kind of restriction on its members. I just can’t believe anyone would actually go along with it.

I just got an email from the Barack Obama campaign regarding an appalling new mailer just sent out by the RNC. This is really disgusting. Please do what you can to help Barack Obama get elected and bring some respectability back to the Oval Office.

I’ve been thinking for quite a while about how the divide between “red” and “blue” America does not occur at the state level. There are not “red” states and “blue” states. The winner-takes-all distribution of electoral votes (a foolish conceit that, fortunately, has only twice ever resulted in the “wrong” guy getting the job, but unfortunately, one of those was George W. Bush in 2000) belies the fact that the divisions occur on a much smaller level, between urban and rural, or between urban-plus-unionized-industry-towns and suburban-enclaves-and-rural-backwaters. The big mystery to me is still how the Republicans managed to convince the rural backwaters that their interests are being represented. (And lest my prejudices be misconstrued, let’s be clear that I’d prefer living in a rural backwater over a suburban enclave.)

With all of the hoopla over Michele Bachmann in the last few days — mainly in the form of the rest of the country realizing what a lunatic she is, even though most of us here in Minnesota (except in her own district, apparently) already knew it — I’ve been thinking more about these strange divisions.

Among the anti-Obama rumors spread since he announced his candidacy was the claim that he had taken his oath of office on the Qur’an. Not true. Never mind how problematic it is that such a fact would be considered outrageous; it’s in line with McCain cluelessly retorting to the woman (also in Minnesota, what the hell’s going on around here?) who claimed Obama was an Arab (how’s that again?) that, no, he is in fact a decent family man. Islam itself is not a pejorative. The fact of the Qur’an matter is that the congressman who took his oath on that book is none other than Keith Ellison, my congressional representative, from Minnesota’s Fifth District. Yes, the district directly adjacent to Michele Bachmann’s Sixth District.

That people’s values and sensibilities could be so segregated, based as far as I can tell upon little beyond population density, to create a situation where one (highly urban) district elects the nation’s first Muslim representative to the House, on the very same day that an adjacent (mostly suburban) district would elect the ultimate ignorant xenophobe, leaves me so flummoxed that I can’t find my way to the end of this sentence. Elbridge Gerry himself could not have drawn so convoluted a map dividing red from blue.

Needless to say, I consider Michele Bachmann an embarrassment to Minnesota. So even though I’m not in that district, I’m supporting Elwyn Tinklenberg, and I would encourage anyone who can afford to do so to make a contribution to his campaign, regardless of where you live. Besides the fact that he has a friggin’ awesome name (and a decent sense of humor — check out the videos on his site), he’s a good Democrat committed bringing sanity back to the Sixth.

I believe that’s the correct translation from Swedish. Lekande Barn is also a new compilation CD I’ve just produced featuring the music of Bassius-O-Phelius, an improvisatory music duo I participated in with Mark Bergen from 1994 to 1997. Our first album was entitled Swedish Children at Play, so when it came time to title this compilation, it was a no-brainer. (Well, OK, it did take the brain power of tracking down the Swedish translation of “Children at Play” and locate a photo of a sign bearing that message.)

I’ve remastered 14 of our old tracks through the wonders of modern technology. It’s truly amazing how far things have advanced in the last decade, because I don’t really consider 1998 to be that long ago. (I was already married and working as a professional web designer, for crying out loud!) You can listen to the entire album via a streaming playlist, or buy your own copy on CD, by visiting the Bassius-O-Phelius page.