So I pick up the phone this morning and there’s a text.
Hey is this Natalie?
My phone was listed in the school directory, so I get these from time to time.
Next message:
Hey this is chris from SA if ur remember
What’s odd is this: first message 3:22, second message 6:13.
AM.
So I text back:
This is her father’s phone. What’s SA?
Reply:
o OK super america she gave me her # when I saw her at SA anmd didnt relize it was her phone does she have her own phone or does she use urs
I text back:
I’ll pass on your message.
Ok di know wuts her # if its alright if I can have it we were going to get together at 2 today and she didn’t know if she would meet me
Okay. What. The. Farg. I call the number later, no one picks up. The person calls me back later. Youngish voice, but could be a 40-year-old female smoker; raspy, rather high. After identifying myself as the person who got the texts, this “Chris” says Natalie passed along this phone number and said they could hang out around 2, or whatever.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Twenty.”
“My daughter is eleven.”
At this point there’s a moment of silence as the kid on the other end probably blanches and freaks and WTFs
“She didn’t look eleven,” he said.
“Which SuperAmerica was this?”
“In Hutch.”
“Hutch? You meaning Hutchingson?” It’s a lower-central Minnesota town about an hour and a half from the cities. He said yeah.
“The number was kinda hard to read,” he said.
So some girl in a gas station named Natalie, or so she says, gives him a number, which may not be the right number, and he gets a guy with a daughter named Natalie.
Informed of the uselessness of the number, he apologizes, and says “I’ll ask her for the number if I see her again.”
You do that, son.
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I watched “The Wild Party,” which I thought was based on the poem that tells the tale of a low-rent 20s bohemian bash. It’s not, even though it starts with someone reading the poem. It’s about Fatty Arbuckle except that it’s not. James Coco is a miserable SOB fat comedian, a dreadful man, unlikeable, maudlin, desperate, cruel. Desperate for a comeback, he produces and stars in a silent movie, but get this - the invention of talkies have rendered his old style irrelevant! People don’t want that anymore! His showing flops, there’s a party, he gets drunk, and shoots everyone, including Raquel Welch, who plays his paramour. She does some dancing, in a scene that makes you feel as though the Massive Cringe-Induction Array in the southwestern desert has been fed the coordinates of your house and set to TEN. It's HERE, unembeddable. All the parts of the routine are fine; they're just assembled by memorization. She also does a vampy dance that’s utterly inert. It tells you something about the script that the funnyman who was a miserable SOB is named “Jolly Grimm.” Ooooh. Deep.
Bonus fun: the producers. HAHAHAHAHAH
How 70s can you get? The Penultimate font, aka the Mary Tyler Moore credits font.
The Arbuckle story is not what most people think it is. Or is it? Does everyone know he was innocent of the charges? There was a party, a woman died, but not because he outraged her, to use the terms of the day, with an ice chunk, or a Coke bottle. She probably died from an abortion. Arbuckle’s wikipedia page has more on the manslaughter trials (they state took three whacks at putting him away, and failed) than on his movies. A pity, and an injustice; he was quite good.
Something jarring: his first movie was made . . . over a hundred years ago. Hard to get my head around that, for some reason.
Also watched “Contagion,” which deals with a world-wide flu pandemic that gets stopped before too many people die or the film becomes too interesting, and “Harper,” a Paul Newman mid-60s movie. He plays a private eye, and the original character was named Archer, but after Hud and Hustler he had to have an Aitch in the title, I guess. Old-style PI movie with slight tweaks for the modern age, and had Arthur Hill, one my favorite actors, probably because of “Andromeda Strain,” in which he played Michael Crichton.
Here’s the deal on the RSS feed and the redirect page and all that. I believe I’ve figured out the rss problem. If you want to know why it’s so damned difficult, and why I just can’t DO THIS like every other site, it’s because many things are just beyond my ken. Or my attention span. Crafting the xml file, figuring out where it went - pshaw! Peon work! I am an ARTIST! I create, I do not arrange for the fellow who brings the truck to the loading dock to carry away the products of my genius.
The problem was in the feed generator, but now that I’ve tweaked the index page to its liking, it seems to work.
And you may ask: why don’t I just put this up at lileks.com/bleats? What’s with the funky redirect business, huh?
Part of it has to to do with the RSS requirements, and hardwiring a link into the entry. The other thing has to do with the comments. The new version of Dreamweaver I’m using is crap. Six new flavors of crap. I’m sure it has many new wonderful features, but OY GEVALT. The anchor-linking function just doesn’t work. At all.
So in order to make the comments work for each page, they can’t be on the index page. In order to make rss work there has to be an index page. In order to make rss and comments work together there has to be a redirect. The upside is that it’s hands-off: clicking on the index page if you’re not an RSS subscriber gives you a little tease, then you’re off. I’ll probably dump this soon enough. If you are an RSS subscriber, it’s not noticed.
Anyway. That’s that.
