Monthly Archives: September 2014

Indiana State Fair 2014 Photos, Part 3: The Great Local-Celeb Milking Contest

September 12, 2014 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

State Fair Milk!

The winner’s cup. MILK: what it’s all about.


Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides and big-ticket concerts by musicians that other people love. My wife and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context.

In our previous episode I touched on the variety of shows and competitions happening around the fairgrounds. One of the events we usually miss is the annual Celebrity Milking Contest. In this context the “celebrities” are local personalities unfamiliar to anyone living outside Indianapolis and to some of us lifelong citizens. We’d only watched the contest once before, a few years ago when the winner was the then-governor’s wife. Sure, they may not be movie stars or even YouTube headliners, but how often do we have the chance to watch cow-milking competitions? Besides, it was free.

Right this way for your 2014 contestants!

Apple’s 9/9/14 Superinfomercial and the New U2 Album, Track by Track

September 11, 2014 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Songs of Innocence!

Ready and waiting for its future home on a Starbucks spinner rack.

I’m not a regular Apple customer. The last time I used one of their products was in college in 1991 when I took a “Statistical Psychology” class that was equipped with three rows of Macintosh units. In a time when DOS and BASIC had been the sole domains in my little computing world, the Macintosh was my introduction to the concept of the Graphic User Interface, which wasn’t a commonplace thing until the advent of Windows. Yes, I’m that old.

But I’ve never owned an Apple product, bearing in mind that digital downloads barely count as “ownership” in my mind, and my iTunes “library” so far is more like a Hot Wheels bookmobile. Apple’s ostentatious new-product announcements are usually outside my fields of interest. I’m not an early adopter in any tech-related areas. At all.

New iPhone? Pass. My phone is a Samsung S2 that accomplishes my simple daily needs as long as I remember to reboot once a week. (Longtime MCC readers may recall I was once staunchly anti-smartphone in general, until life gave me reasons not to be.) My phone isn’t broken, and once survived a ten-foot drop onto a metal catwalk with zero damage. I’m good for now.

New smartwatch with triple-digit price tag? Pass. I can’t function away from home without wearing a watch (see: “old”), but I rarely need to shop for a new one because any given fifteen-dollar waterproof department-store digital watch with a lithium battery will last me years. They’re arguably one of Walmart’s most durable products, and it’s faster for me to glance at my wrist than it is to pocket and unpocket any other time-telling gizmo, including my phone. And that lithium battery drains ten thousand times more slowly than any phone battery will.

But then Apple went in an unexpected direction with their third platform plank: a new U2 album. For free. Finally, a product in my price range and tangential to my personal interests. Sold!

Right this way for the listening results…

There’s Nothing Wrong with Your Internet Connection. For Now.

September 9, 2014 By in Meta, Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Net Neutrality.

90% of the following message was provided as an unpaid courtesy by Battle For The Net. The other 10% is value-added MCC editing and reformatting.

* * * * *

If you woke up tomorrow and your internet looked like this, what would you do?

Imagine all your favorite websites taking forever to load, while you get annoying notifications from your ISP suggesting you switch to one of their approved “Fast Lane” sites. Think about what we would lose: all the weird, alternative, interesting, and enlightening stuff that makes the Internet so much cooler than mainstream cable TV. What if the only news sites you could reliably connect to were the ones that had deals with companies like Comcast and Verizon?

On September 10th, just a few days before the FCC’s comment deadline, public interest organizations are issuing an open, international call for websites and internet users to unite for an “Internet Slowdown” to show the world what the web would be like if Team Cable gets their way and trashes net neutrality. Net neutrality is hard to explain, so our hope is that this action will help show the world what’s really at stake if we lose the open Internet.

If you’ve got a website, blog or Tumblr, get the code to join the #InternetSlowdown at the official site. The Internet Slowdown official Tumblr also has a quick list of other things you can do to help spread the word about the slowdown.

Get creative! Don’t let us tell you what to do. See you on the net September 10th!

Net Neutrality.

* * * * *

Special thanks to Automattic, the talented minds behind WordPress, for supporting this effort all the way. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen them advocating from the front lines of the internet battlefield. If I could hug or high-five each of their employees personally, I totally would.

Our 2006 Road Trip Photos, Part 17: the Season Finale and the Lost Outtakes

September 8, 2014 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Piggies!

Outtake #1 of 5: baby piggies napping at the Minnesota Zoo. When we arrived home late at the end of our drive, this is how peacefully we slept that night.

[The very special miniseries concludes! See Part One for the official intro and context to this MCC remastered edition.

Fun trivia: the original 2006 version of this entry was posted entirely without visuals because neither of us took a single photo on Day 7. As a special bonus to break up the monotony for today’s readers, especially for anyone who craves photos but couldn’t care less about my writing, this evening my wife and I delved into the deep end of our closet and disinterred the rest of her 35mm hard-copy photos from 2006. Previous entries used a combination of excerpts from her scrapbooks and saved files from my first year as a digital camera owner. The five unrelated photos seen here, each of which reference activities from previous chapters, have never been scanned or shared online until now. Nothing fancy or disappointing about them; we basically forgot they existed.]

Right this way for the extended epilogue!

Our Annual Family Reunion Adventure

September 8, 2014 By in Indiana, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Turkey Run!

For fifty-seven years my wife’s family has held their annual reunions at Turkey Run State Park, a ninety-minute drive from our suburban HQ and well outside the range of my phone carrier’s disappointing 4G coverage. For the space of one Sunday afternoon it’s an opportunity to unplug from the internet and all its problems, experience fresh air, enjoy good weather live and in person (Lord willing), catch up with loved ones that we’ve been too preoccupied to visit, exchange pleasantries with distant relatives whose names we’ll never remember, test which family members will still commit to a long drive for any of these purposes, and remember how to mingle in large, awkward groups without access to Words with Friends as our consolation playmate.

Or, while everyone else is talking, you can escape the shindig for a while and go explore the best part of Turkey Run, the beautiful forests crisscrossed with several miles of nature-trail adventure.

Continue reading →

Indiana State Fair 2014 Photos, Part 2: Normal-Gator vs. Manasaurus

September 7, 2014 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Man v. Gator!

Steel wading pool exhibition match. Two vertebrates enter; two vertebrates leave.


Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides and big-ticket concerts by musicians that other people love. My wife and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context.

The State Fair also brings in entertainers from around the globe at various levels. Top-40 musicians play at the Coliseum; former Top-40 musicians play the large, free main stage; local acts play an even smaller stage; and a few touring entertainers perform in the farm-equipment areas, around the animal-education section, or near the 4-H Building. The latter charge no admission, earning only the intake from whatever merchandise they sell after their performance.

One of this year’s freebies was a traveling roadshow called “Kachunga and the Alligator”. The basic premise was several minutes of stage patter about swampland conservation and animal rights, followed by a few minutes of a man tussling with a modest alligator.

Continue reading →

The Hunger Boxers

September 4, 2014 By in Indiana, Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Gleaners!

Photo by a cheerful Gleaners representative. They strongly encouraged social media sharing. Consider it done!

No, that’s not a photo of my interim reign as CEO of the Box Factory. But I can dream.

Last week my employer tried something new: they gave several hundred of us the opportunity to spend half a workday (on the clock!) participating in scheduled acts of service at various charities throughout Indianapolis — charitable synergy courtesy of United Way.

I signed up and went forth to serve last Thursday morning at Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana, one of the most prominent resources in local hunger relief efforts. Oddly, my shift happened a full week before our local media declared today as Hunger Action Day. My coworkers and I may have missed that holiday, but I should hope our efforts were useful regardless of timing.

More about my day in a makeshift Minecraft scene…

Our 2006 Road Trip, Part 16: Another Hick in the Mall

September 3, 2014 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context…]

Day 6: Thursday, July 27th

By the third day of our stay at the same Bloomington hotel, we were finding it difficult to make the same breakfast buffet seem novel and appetizing. We ate much less than usual, contenting ourselves with watching in amusement as a whole new line of hotel guests each found their own way to screw up the waffle-making process. The instructions were right there on the wall, but we were amazed at the damage to be done by forgetting to use cooking spray, by pouring in the wrong amounts of batter, by pouring the batter unevenly on one side, by neglecting to turn the waffle-maker to the ON position and thereby negating the timer, and so on. As former longtime restaurant employees, Anne and I are elitist like that.

Our objective was the one and only Mall of America. Our family and friends back home were more excited about this stop than we were. When Anne and I first traveled together in 1999, one of the first and unhappiest lessons we learned was that chain retail stores, with extremely few exceptions, carry the exact same merchandise from state to state. Walmarts in Kentucky have the same Star Wars figures as those in Indiana. Toys-R-Us-es in Missouri line their shelves with the same clearance worst-sellers as those back home. By logical extension, we assumed even the Mall of America would be subject to this guideline. We figured we had to try it anyway, on behalf of our friends and family demanding their vicarious thrills after the fact. Besides, when in Rome, and all that.

Mall of America!

Continue reading →

My Labor Day Weekend 2014 TV Marathon Report

September 3, 2014 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Peter Dinklage!

Tyrion Lannister wishes you would go away.

I’m grateful every day to have a job that observes the largely superfluous privilege of Labor Day. I spent most of the weekend recovering from “con crud” and saving up energy and money for future chores and exploits. It was nice to have the time and excuse to make headway into my infinite viewing pile — with my wife’s blessing, no less. I’ll make a point of mowing the lawn some other week, just for her.

The weekend’s results, in no particular order:

* The Station Agent (Netflix): Before Game of Thrones, and slightly before his winning scene in Elf, Peter Dinklage starred in this 2003 indie, a low-key character piece about a railroad enthusiast who retreats to small-town New Jersey after his best friend dies and his model-train hobby shop is sold off. His attempts at hermitage are thwarted daily as life pushes other people into his path — a happy-go-lucky food-truck runner (Bobby Cannavale), a separated wife and grieving mother (Patricia Clarkson), a teen librarian with a secret (frequent Oscar nominee Michelle Williams), an unassuming young black girl, the backwater citizens who mock his stature, and Mad Men‘s John Slattery in a bit part as a disgruntled husband. Dinklage barely talks, letting his doleful gaze speak or deflect for him, but he slowly emerges from inner captivity as the tracks are laid for new connections to new friends, each overlooking the others’ outward differences and recognizing their inner wounds.

Right this way for the rest of the viewing schedule…