dom.blog

Usually this blog has a lot more narrative focus and/or available photos after I’ve been travelling, but going to Palo Alto never quite works. I was there last week for work, back in the trusty and still murder-free Comfort Inn, but at heart Palo Alto is a deeply suburban place and so any photos would just be of people’s back gardens and flower pots.

I did enjoy having dinner with my new team, as well as an evening with Nolan after a quick hop to San Francisco by train, and in the Lyft on the way back to the airport I craned my head around when I realised we had stopped to pick someone up at Facebook’s HQ to see if there was anything worth seeing. But there wasn’t, besides people holding their thumbs up outside a large Thumbs Up sign. Just a large campus in the middle of nowhere and shuttle busses to move employees in and out. The best way to describe this part of the world is that it’s as if Lloyds, Barclays and HSBC all decided to plonk their global headquarters in Amersham.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Apropos nothing, here’s what happens when Randi has to wait for brunch

Death by dysentery

Back in Chicago, we were delighted to meet baby Bernard Edward at Robert and Julie’s. The name immediately triggered memories of being read Not Now, Bernard in primary school, and it was only after I’d ordered the book as a gift (newborns can read, right?) that I realised how dark (and British?) the story is. Parents: don’t ignore your kids until they are eaten by monsters. One thing that Bernard Edward will almost certainly never experience is The Oregon Trail, a video game classic now parodied in boardgame form, which we played with Amanda, Alec and John the other night. The nostalgia factor was absent for me, since I never actually played the game – why exactly would I want take my wagon to Oregon anyway? – and by all of the ‘rules’ of boardgames it’s pretty terrible. Players can just die, from pure bad luck, and are immediately exiled from the rest of the game. But we enjoyed it with the right spirit, and some of us even made it to Oregon, too.

MisterWives

Randi and I also saw one of her favourite bands, MisterWives, as well as 1980 (Or Why I’m Voting for John Anderson), a political comedy about clashing personalities within the Boston branch of John Anderson’s independent 1980 presidential election campaign. Two Facebook HQ-sized thumbs up! (Side-note: in real life, you should never actually work for an independent presidential election campaign.)

Thanks to Randi’s curious intransigence about driving me to Oklahoma, that state is still pending a visit. So, last weekend we did the next best thing and watched Oklahoma!, the 1955 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical. As a child I loved this film, which (for some reason) we had on both VHS and audio cassette, and I spent many hours alternating between the two. Mostly I loved the song ‘The Farmer and the Cowman’, because I thought their being friends was a great idea, and was too young to realise that healing the rural class divide would only cement their united opposition to big city liberalism and Medicare.

I don’t think I cared much about the romance stuff back then, and even today I still find it rather puzzling. In case you’re unfamiliar with the plot of Oklahoma!, here’s a summary: Curly (a clean-cut cowman) and Laurey (a clean-cut farm girl) are very obviously in love with each other, but Laurey is offended by Curly asking her to the dance too late, and so she agrees to go instead with Jud (her surly hired hand on the farm, who lives in a shack and is maybe 50/50 on having maybe once burned a family to death) to make Curly jealous. There’s also some subtext here about fancy farm girl Laurey being unsatisfied with Curly’s lowly cowman status, although shacking up with the guy-who-lives-in-a-shack is a curious way to maintain your social standing.

But the really odd thing in this film is Jud, because nobody reacts to Jud in the way you might expect. Typically, the ‘boy invited along to make the other boy jealous’ character falls into one of two categories. Either he’s the laughing-stock underdog whom the audience is rooting for to win the girl around for real, or he’s the popular and socially desirable choice (rich, handsome, Hugh Grant) but secretly a psychopath. Jud is the laughing-stock underdog who’s pretty openly a psychopath and yet he goes around menacing Laurey and her Aunt Eller as if he has the upper hand, despite the fact that they are his employers and could fire him at any minute. (Spoiler alert: eventually, they do.) Was casual farm labour in the Oklahoman economy really so scarce that Jud holds all the cards? What gives?

There’s a bright golden hazy plot point on the meadow

So as excited as I’m sure you were to read three paragraphs about a 62 year old musical, how about something completely different? How about, say, some audio promotion for this blog? You got it!

Thanks to Michael Wians, who auctioned off custom rap tracks as part of our internal fundraising at work for those affected by Hurricane Harvey. (Yes, this was before all of the other hurricanes. I may need a sequel.) It has been a busy couple of weeks, with many visitors congregating on the Chicago office and organising dinners and having many opinions on where those dinners should be, although I must say that the delegation I led to Kuma’s for burgers made no complaints.

Last Friday Randi and I also saw The Audience with Catherine and AJ, the 2013 play about Queen Elizabeth’s weekly meeting with her many Prime Ministers which I thought I’d missed forever. I obviously enjoyed it, because it was clearly written for me, although I’m not sure that anyone coming fresh to British politics could get anything at all. The accents were a little all over the place, but entirely forgivably, Thatcher was terrifying, as per life, and at the end they lit up big photographs around the theatre of all of the modern Prime Ministers under flashing lights while playing Dancing Queen, and it was both hilarious and silly but also a deep relief that the UK does not ever actually expect anyone to ever display a Prime Minister’s portrait. If we ever find ourselves casting for a new Head of State, let’s make it David Attenborough or Jean-Luc Picard or Curly the Cowman or someone.

Oklahoma! If I do ever visit now, I’ve already used up my background anecdotes.

Once in a while I become angsty about my blog’s looks, and then go into a redecorating coma for a week trying to put things right. So, here I am, regenerating again. Welcome to this site’s Fifth Republic!

Farewell, London theme

On the homepage, I’ve finally found a timeline plugin which I’m happy with, and which will quietly mock my insufficient frequency of blogging. Over in the sidebar – unless you’re on a phone, of course, in which case it’ll be stuffed down the bottom somewhere – you’ll notice some enticing emoji. Click / tap / concentrate the power of your mind on these to explore the archives geographically. (It’s non-exhaustive, I hasten to add, partly because that would take an awfully long time and partly because geotagging people’s homes is a little creepy.) And yes, there are also bugs. Sorry about the bugs. I will try and fix the bugs.

Poor South London

Finally, at the request of precisely one person, you can subscribe for email updates in the footer. (Q: Couldn’t you just tell Randi when you’ve added a new post? A: I guess.)

I looked for the least inspiring word

Talking of Randi, we can finally add her to the Faces of Freedom gallery at the Chicago History Museum after a quick trip this morning, following in the footsteps of Cat and Matt when they visited Chicago. (Yes, you can also find that on the Chicago map! It’s all so integrated!) And talking of Cat and Matt, remember when we spent hours watching YouTube videos of people opening mystery boxes? Well, once I got back to Chicago I decided I couldn’t think of anyone more deserving of a mystery box of their own, so I sent them a package containing a pair of men’s touchscreen gloves, a Halloween glow pendant, some Reese’s miniatures, a ‘Super Asmr Tingles Collection 2’ CD and a Wisconsin Badgers shower curtain. I think you can see Cat’s joy in every frame. (And yes, the woman in the post office genuinely asked me if Cat Hurley was a human or whether I was addressing a box to a cat.)

The World’s Best Unboxing Video

You know that scene when Clara steps into the Doctor’s timestream and is everywhere in his life at once? (If the answer is ‘no’, then you should be catching up on several series of Doctor Who instead of reading this.) That’s sorta how I feel after doing reconstructive surgery on my old blog posts in preparation for this website’s Next Big Upgrade™.  Suddenly I find myself getting distracted by a photo of the old Box Office in Willesden Green Library, or Waseley High School, and I need to focus if I’m ever going to get it finished.

Carnivale

Back in the present day, I’ve started a new role at Groupon, and Randi and I celebrated our anniversary at Carnivale. Together with Amanda and our neighbours, Joe and Julie, we also attended ‘After Hours’ at the Museum of Science and Industry. Aside from standing in creepy tubes (see below), the highlight was a science-themed Second City improv performance.

Also, last Friday night, we had a really lovely evening on McKenna’s rooftop with some friends from work, her dog and plenty of drinks. There’s no fun photo or quirky anecdote from that one, but it was too enjoyable not to include, and it will bring a smile to my face a decade from now when I’m going back through this old post to upgrade it to a series of telepathic impressions.

Whatever happened to Julie?

Happy birthday Amanda!

Birthday candle and/or firework

But mostly this post is dedicated to Amanda! This week we marked her birthday with sushi, cake, promises of a forthcoming cat sculpture which I nabbed in an internal charity auction at work (holding an auction over Google Sheets doesn’t make it any less intense) and more games of Dominion. (If anyone is keeping score, we’re up to three expansions and counting…)

Her mum, sister and niece visited over the weekend, and they came bearing copies of the Belleville Area Independent (“Belleville’s Favourite Newspaper!”) from the hometown where they grew up in Michigan for us to sample. And so in the spirit of nostalgia, I would like to reprint below a column which Nic would have rejected from Ruberyvillage.co.uk in a heartbeat. It’s worth reading in full for all of its raw, gonzo journalistic insight.

John Delaney and the $2 pizza

America has a quartet of national sports: baseball, basketball, ice hockey (or ‘hockey’) and American football (or, ahem, ‘football’). Baseball, as regular readers will know, is a great game to see in person. Sure, it is possible that a baseball might sneak up and whack you in the face, putting a bit of a dampener on the rest of the experience, but otherwise it’s a great game to see in person. American football, on the other hand, was not high on my priority list: partly because of the game itself, but also because tickets are obscenely expensive. But then Randi scored a free pair of tickets to a preseason game of the Chicago Bears vs. the Cleveland Browns, so why not try another slice of Americana?

Side-note: my new Groupon hoodie is intensely comfortable

The good things:

• The game itself is much more bearable than on TV, which is notoriously stuffed with adverts. Of course, the game is still frozen during these times, but it is a lot less jarring.
• We were spared cheerleaders, and instead treated to an enthusiastic drum line.
• The NFL have craftily imposed a consistent theme tune between all TV broadcasts and the live games themselves… it’s catchy!
• Watching a small army of people manoeuvre a giant flag around is inherently funny and/or makes me want to play that ‘parachute’ game from primary school PE lessons.
• I ate chili from a bowl constructed entirely from a giant pretzel. And then I ate the bowl too. Enough said.

However:

• The game itself is still… not great. The stop-start-go-back-to-the-beginning feels like a giant and overly-obvious metaphor for Congress.
• I was genuinely dumbfounded to learn that different players play during the offence vs. defence sections of the game. And then some players have even more specialised roles, like ‘occasionally kick the ball’.
• The Chicago Bears themselves are clearly terrible, and contrived to score nul points against 25 from the Browns.
• Is it just me, or is it nigh impossible to actually see the ball? They should make it florescent, or huge and inflatable.

That said, I would definitely be up for a return visit, if the tickets were cheap and it didn’t involve sitting outside in the middle of a snowstorm. And I still have the NFL theme tune in my head, so that’s a win for America.

I can’t think of any appropriate transition from American football to glass blowing, but take a look at these:

Our beautiful glass creations

Randi and I ‘made’ these gorgeous glasses at Ignite Glass Studios (on a Groupon!) during a one-hour glass blowing class. I say ‘made’ because our instructor, Joe, was very much the one doing the actual work. At most I picked the colours, nervously rotated the pipe and blew when he told me to. But it was incredibly cool to be in their workshop, feeling the heat of the furnaces and seeing how flexible glass is at those temperatures. Would recommend.

Secret Hitler gang (with theme-appropriate sepia)

The wine glasses also came in handy during our Secret Hitler games this weekend. I wrote about this game last time we played, but excitingly this was the first time I was actually in a winning fascist team (a sentence which is getting a bit iffy to write these days, but never mind) and it felt great. Please also let the record state that despite being a bona fide liberal in both games, James was nevertheless assassinated in both games. Lying is fun.

Other than this, and a quick drink at Hillary’s birthday party on Labour Day itself, we (unusually) decided to spend the long weekend relaxing at home (and playing lots of Dominion) rather than trying to pack in a crazy trip. In the spirit of London, however, I did manage to find Randi one Indian restaurant in Chicago willing to cook her an off-menu fish pasanda. (The chef apparently had some misgivings, but it worked out.)