gag me with a spoon

This last weekend was the Gathering at the Grove, or GAG, which is one of the worst acronyms I’ve ever heard.  It is basically youth conference for the nonyouth.  If I actually had a job I would’ve claimed that I needed the weekend to recuperate from my hectic work week.  But I could think of no honest excuse why I couldn’t go, so ponied up the twenty bucks and headed to Palmyra on Friday.  

Friday consisted of registration and a dance.  I quickly remembered why I haven’t attended a dance in several years.  Throughout the evening I had many flashbacks of the “Super Saturday” dances of my early high school days.  Bad music, bad refreshments, bad dancing (mostly from me) etc.  It’s just not the most enjoyable event.  I sympathized with the DJs; providing quality music for an LDS dance would be very difficult.  Language cuts out most of your song options.  If they carefully listened to lyrics, most of the rest would be eliminated as well.  I’m sure they get all kinds of requests that the majority of the crowd would actually hate (a handful want Swing, another group wants country, another wants techno, nobody wants all of them.)  But I think we were all resigned to the fact that the music would suck and tried to ignore the fact.

The biggest problem I have with dances is that they are singularly bad events for meeting people.  After all, this was the de facto purpose of the conference.  There were a couple hours of workshops, but the rest of the weekend was basically gigantic group dates.  But dances are horrible formats for meeting girls.  You can’t accurately tell what a girl looks like in the lighting, which is problematic on two levels.  On the completely shallow level you can’t tell how cute she is, and thus if you want to pursue her.  On the more practical level you won’t be able to recognize her very well the next day to follow-up on those you meet during the dance.  Of course you can see during a dance, so the visual aspect is a relatively minor problem.  The much bigger obstacle is that you often can’t hear a thing.  You’ve got YMCA pumping in her ears (sadly it was played) while you’re trying to meet people.  You can usually shout your name out well enough, but actually conversing is rather difficult.  You end up yelling in their ears the whole time and are never sure if you actually heard them right.  I never ask anyone out without knowing them fairly well, and consequently rarely get dates from dances.  Hence the reason I stopped going and was only suckered in to this one because it would theoretically contain all dating prospects from western NY.

The evening did not go well.  I only know a handful of people from Rochester, and none were there when I first arrived.  So I ended up doing a lot of random accosting of unsuspecting girls.  The first I chose seemed promising.  She was obviously pretty intelligent and seemed cute (though strobe lights do lie.)  After about ten minutes of low-level flirting did she move from talkative to a bit stinted.  At that point I noticed the ring on her finger.  Normally this is something you look for before talking to a girl, but I was at a singles dance.  Why was a married girl at a singles dance?  To my credit I think I got out of the conversation quickly, but made it still seem like I was just done with our friendly talk.  I was happy later in the evening when a girl gave me her phone number, only to see her the next day with her boyfriend.  I was already tired of this and the weekend had just begun.

Luckily I found a friend of mine who had also just moved in my Singles branch later that evening.  He served as my wingman (and vice versa) for the rest of the weekend.  I don’t fully understand the psychological reason why it’s ten times easier to meet girls when you have another person with you, but it is a scientific fact.  The other guy doesn’t even have to say anything (although it certainly helps when he does,) he just needs to be present.  If nothing else it meant that you never looked like a total social outcast.  We went to the service project Saturday morning, which involved moving a bunch of antique printing equipment from one museum facility to another.  We had roughly three times the number of people we needed, ensuring that most of us were standing around either flirting or playing with sledgehammers at all times.  We mostly hung out with a bunch of Canadians I had met the day before (this group was pretty much my only successful contacts from the previous evening.)

A sidenote (as if the rest of this were straightforward): there were an insane number of Canadians at the conference.  I’d say they outnumbered the Americans 2:1 for most of the weekend.  This is an unfortunate ratio, but even worse was that every gorgeous girl you talked to was Canadian.  (I accidentally said this near an American girl, which was not my smoothest moment.)  I don’t know what they’re doing up there, but they’re producing some amazing aesthetics, at least among their LDS population.  A girl loses a couple points for being Canadian in my book, but it’s certainly something they can easily overcome.  It’s comparable to being from Idaho or being unable to use semicolons.  However living 6 or 8 hours away from me is pretty hard for them to overcome.  If I loved someone I could certainly put up with a long distance relationship.  But it’s incredibly unlikely that I could meet someone one day and be willing to be in a long distance relationship the next.  Consequently it was largely an inefficient use of our time to flirt with our northern neighbors.  Even worse was the number of French Canadians.  Again, they were cute, but the French connection eliminated them outright.

The workshops and speakers were fine, but again I don’t think that they were the reason anyone attended the event.  The meals were satisfactory, and probably justified my twenty dollar investment.  We even had Applebees cater one dinner, which seemed very strange for a church event.  Saturday night we had another dance.  Unfortunately they ran out of music about an hour in and started playing the music from the night before.  Bad music is bad enough, but it’s especially aggravating to hear the exact same bad music the next night.  Sunday was just church and a lunch afterward.  The event closed at 2 and we hung around the Hill Cumorah until 3.

So that was my weekend.  Sometimes fun, often painful.  Rarely both.  By the end of the event I had a handful of phone numbers.  Now all they have to do is dump their boyfriends, move to America and help me decide where to go to medical school.

Song of the moment: “I’m Blue” the 5678s.

X3: Better than XXX, but only just

I caught the midnight showing of X3 last night.  Why did I do such a thing, when I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be good?  I’m unemployed, what else do I have to do?  Plus I get to watch all the freaks who show up to midnight showings.  And sure enough, they came out in full force.  The theater was packed, primarily with teenage boys.  There were a few hapless girlfriends and older types there, but the high school lot definitely made up the vast majority.  People would start clapping in unison fifteen minutes before the show started, evidently trying to peer pressure the projectionist into starting the movie early.  This didn’t work so they started doing the wave.  Eventually they tired of this and started screaming the answer to the movie theater trivia, screaming even louder every time when they got it right.  The only act I found truly amusing was when they started making the Colossus sound effect from the 80’s video game.  It was moderately embarrassing that I would recognize this extremely obscure reference, but I do know quite a bit about X-Men.  Hopefully I’m one day on Jeopardy and X-Men is a category so I can justify learning all this trivia in my youth.

As predicted the movie wasn’t very good.  It wasn’t bad per se, but I certainly wouldn’t describe it as good.  The script, director and casting problems I’ve been reading about for the last two years were evident on the screen.  The dialogue was overdramatic and cliché.  Admittedly it made it sound like a comic book, but not a good one.  One that you read when you were ten and thought was awesome, but doesn’t hold up when you read it as an adult.  I suspect I would’ve thought the movie was awesome a decade ago, but at this age the plot holes drove me crazy.  There were quite a few “Why in the world did they do that?” moments scattered throughout the movie.  I was never surprised by supposed plot-twists or shocking moments, but I have seen a ton of movies and read far too many comics.    

The effects were mostly quite good.  I disagreed with using Beast and Angel in the movie and sure enough, their effects were the weakest.  I had applauded the inclusion of Colossus, and he was decent.  Juggernaut was better than I thought he’d be, but still wasn’t fantastic.  But with thirty years of X-Men history to pull from, I don’t understand why they made up new characters for this movie when they could easily have pulled from the mythos.  And although I’m fine with them altering story elements to fit the movie format, they made many changes that I felt detracted rather than added to the story.  

So it was ok.  It’s got some good action and effects.  It’s an effective conclusion to the previous two movies which were significantly better.  I think this should be the end of it, but the last scene before the credits most definitely is a desperate plea for X4.  Being the nerdish fanboys we are, a large portion of the audience had heard about the bonus scene after the credits.  Unfortunately the projectionist didn’t know about it, so turned off the film before it came on.  That was quite irritating.  So I had to scour the internet to discover the last scene, and it too points to X4.  So make sure you don’t have an idiot projectionist and stay for the coda.  
  

Troubled Surfing

Channel specialization is nothing new.  Ever since cable was introduced we’ve had access to channels we never thought we could need.  Who would ever think of doing a weather channel on a local basis?  So we’ve had a while to get used to this idea.  I personally have no need for a fishing channel, but have no problem with it occupying channel 98 on my cable box.  

What bothers me is that the programming on these channels is increasingly divergent from their intended purpose.  What’s the point of having the Golf channel if it shows tennis?  If it was the preppy sport channel, it would be fine.  But that is not what they advertise it as.  I would never force myself to watch the Golf channel to look for non-golf programming, but here are some examples of odd programming choices I’ve seen in my recently acquired free-time:

Last week in NY my family was watching AMC (American Movie Classics.)  They were showing Hustle, a new British crime drama.  So the show was not American, not a movie and not a classic.  

The History Channel has a number of reality shows.  History is past tense.  Reality shows are present tense.  This is a clear mismatch.

The Discovery Channel has long since lost its vision.  It seems the majority of their programming relates to either interior decorating or building motorcycles.  Both of these are would be alright in small doses, but not the massive airtime they receive.  They now have a gameshow where people hail a taxi, only to find that once inside they get to answer trivia for cash until they reach their destination.  This is tangentially related to educational programming, but it’s pushing the envelope.

I don’t think I need to comment on the state of MTV and VH1.  

Spike (Television for men) shows dating shows and several hours of Star Trek each day.  Not the manliest of material.

Lifetime (Television for women) shows Will and Grace and Frasier all day.  Not horrible certainly, but not a direct match either.

I watched several episodes of Law and Order SVU on the Sci-Fi channel a couple weeks ago.  You could argue that SVU uses science, and that the stories are fictional.  I love SVU, but it shouldn’t be on Sci-Fi.

My conclusion: I have too much time on my hands.  But secondarily, channels need to stick with their intended subject.  The network channels can show whatever they want, but if you name your channel The Bonsai Channel, I expect to see little trees in the programming.  If you don’t have enough material to fill the day, don’t start the channel.  Or have it be the Bonsai and Go-Kart channel.  

Song of the moment: “Casimir Pulaski Day” Sufjan Stevens

Gap in the skyline

 

Eric criticized me for taking pictures of a hole. I criticized him for smelling funny. 

Me n' Joe

 

By far the most interesting thing about this statue is that someone has covered up the sentence on the base about the First Vision. Why not cut the head off the statue like normal vandals do?