July 2007 Archives

When I've tried to talk to people about this minute-long Saturday-morning cartoon public service announcement, featuring Luther Vandross, I've only ever received furled-brow looks of unrecognition mixed with amorphous distaste. Well, of course, I was able to unearth it and PROVE that it exists - outside my head - thanks to Youtube.

The message to the kids is, "be sure to adequately prepare yourselves for your future career life." It also urges them to identify their interests and strengths in order to best serve their future selves (not to mention the economy at large!). All sung to the Name Game.

This PSA was just one in a series. This next one has a similar message, with a healthy dose of "get off your lazy asses!" Scaffolded loosely on the Jack and Jill fairy tale -- MAN that Luther had a sweet voice:

I remember thinking when I saw these, how trivial the message seemed. How obvious, I mean. Didn't everyone know that in order to accomplish the things in life, preparation was a necessary component? Perhaps I wasn't its target audience, though.

I also remember how completely captivated I was. Though I knew better, it was as if these PSAs - and therein their wisdom® - had existed since the beginning of time, passed down through the generations like a cosmic, inalienable birthright. It sounds weird, but I sensed that, at core, They who made these messages positively inhered goodness and intellectual sophistication. Though the whole affair reeked the stench of adults, I completely bought into the messengers, if not the message.

I remember, though, having the feeling that I didn't "get" the whole message. Somehow, paradoxically, I think that the series was too advanced for me. The lyrics were sometimes too unintelligible to understand (was that, "you can make planets?"). Probably the trippy imagery was also too much for me to internalize.

I wonder who commissioned this series. Who wanted this message disseminated? And who were the real targets? I'll have to do some research on that. God I love commercials.

Apparently there's one more PSA in this series. It features the "future blob," though I hadn't remembered it at all until just viewing it now. Probably because, at that age, I was terrorized nightly by visions of The Blob coming into my room and gobbling me up. Damn you, late night scary movies!

"Oh my God! That girl's new sewing machine is going to come alive tonight and devour her!"

Seriously. I couldn't get a good night's sleep for like three years.

The other day I was rummaging about various papers and things that I had brought back - but never actually finished sifting through - from my time living In Komatsu, Japan, working at Komatsu Municipal High School (小松市立高校). I happened to find a poem that my buddy E shared with me. It really touched me:

Listening to you
talking about the bamboo bridge
you wanted to cross and never did
makes me think
of the letters that I wanted to write
and never finished.
it also brings back memories of people
I wanted to get to know better
and never did.
I wonder if I will ever
say the things to you
that I'd like to say.

I had been looking for that poem for ages - because I couldn't recall exactly how it went - and I was thrilled to find it.

I remember trying to explain the poem to my high school students. Even though they could understand all of the words and grammar perfectly, as well as each of the images. But they couldn't quite comprehend the extraordinary pathos that the poem was trying to elicit. Neither, apparently, could my Japanese co-teacher. I guess I did a bad job explaining it.

It's weird which literature students would perfectly grasp, and which they wouldn't. I was not at all able to predict comprehension with any real accuracy. When the students did understand something, they would often offer back extraordinary insights that I hadn't considered before. When they didn't, they just looked at me with a furled brow, and everyone was frustrated.

I don't know who wrote the above poem. I tried to search for it on the web, but to no avail. If anyone knows who I can attribute the poem to, please let me know and I will be happy to do so.

Terence posted an entry about a touch-screen Linux GUI. While cool, I don't think that this particular approach is going to be a valuable technology, particularly for the desktop, for a number of reasons.

1. Notice that the user moves and resizes windows by dragging and dropping his or her finger across the screen. Great if you're a six-year-old with small fingers. Not so great if you're a thirty-year-old with smudgy, greasy, sausage-fingers. The whole notion of interacting with windows, if this technology persists, will have to be completely rethunk. I notice that at one point the user uses a stylus... but who wants to use styli? Writing on a vertical surface is awkward, and the only reason people can pull it off on black/whiteboards is because they have a much greater range of motion with their shoulder. But even writing on boards is hard work, and anyone who has had to do so for any length of time knows how quickly one's arm can become tired.
2. Your hand gets in the way of your line-of-sight. With a mouse, this isn't a problem. But if you're trying to move something with any amount of precision, you'll be straining your neck around your arm and hand to see exactly where you're placing something
3. The multiple desktop navigation - where each desktop is represented as a face on a cube, which you can rotate - is cool, but not extraordinarily functional. The desktop metaphor has worked comparatively well (probably for lack of anything better) for GUI implementations so far, and placing items on a 3D surface does nothing in terms of extending that metaphor in its "intuitive" direction. I think it will also alienate people who are not as abled in terms of spatial reasoning. There may be a use for 3D, but I don't think that this is it. Not to say that the idea of multiple desktops isn't useful - I find it very functional on my Linux box. But as far as 3D goes, I find the extreme zooming in and out of the desktop and windows to be much better application. And one that nearly everyone can immediately understand.
4. The pulling away part of a window to see what's behind it is very cool visually, but I don't think anyone's going to be doing this when you could just as easily do a couple of alt-tabs to quickly change in and out of applications.

I don't know if this is going to be the case with handheld devices. The iPhone has this kind of touch-screen interface, and maybe people will get along fine (or even better) than the desktop. If this is the case, it will render much of my above argument away. But I suspect I'm right on this one, and that people won't be lining up for this kind of interface any time soon for the desktop. At best, this is a transitional technology.

On the other hand, these kinds of GUIs may appeal to consumers' geek chic. Companies like Apple may be able to muscle the market into accepting this kind of GUI for desktops, largely by appealing to this consumer aesthetic. If any company can do it, it's Apple.

I just created a free account at Twitter.com. Twitter, and services like it, allow subscribers to post entries in a kind of "microblog," not only via the web, but also through email, and over the phone! I'm a bit of a laggard experimenting with this technology - it's been quite a long time since Twitter has been released. Nevertheless, I've been meaning to give it a try.

I added a Twitter control to my site, just to the right of here. Now, everyone will know what I do, at all times. I'm sure that all my readers will be thrilled.

I don't know how I'll use Twitter, or even if it will be useful, long-term. But it may very well be - especially if I have any friends with Twitter accounts (BTW, do I?).

Hey, so I found that Volkswagen ad on YouTube, finally.

I worked today, like I did a couple of weeks ago and am doing all this week, in a tall building in Detroit near the General Motors complex. I can look out the window and I can see cars, clearly, driving along the coast of Windsor, Ontario. The buildings are rather smaller there than in Detroit, nestled amongst abundant grassy areas and parks. I yearned for it; It's much greener there on the other side.

There's a parking garage, maybe eight or ten stories tall, near the building where I'm working. I'm looking down at it, but at a shallow angle. It appears that grass has been planted on it. It still looks shitty though.

Maybe it's actually astroturf.

Speaking of AstroTurf, that's my favorite new term - at least new to me. I heard it yesterday when I was listening to my new favorite podcast OnTheMedia - God I love that site! The term refers to organizations' (sometimes successful) attempts to stage fake grassroots campaigns to drum up popular support for whatever policy will most benefit them. Philip Morris staged one such AstroTurf campaign to discredit prominent scientists' good data promoting the global warming theory (and "cherry-pick" the data who said it wasn't happening). The result of the study is that several major media outlets, a few congressmen, and even the executive administration cited the astroturf association. Or so the podcast went. Anyway, the whole podcast - including transcript! - is here.

I also heard a piece on a Slate podcast yesterday (entitled The Mixing Desk on the Sounds of Starbucks) about Starbucks' new music label, Hear Music. What? Starbucks has a music label?

I hadn't heard this before, but, once you think about it, it makes sense. In order for Starbucks to grow it needs to create that whole "lifestyle experience" thing. The average Starbucks regular is deep down inside a wanna-be coolster, neo-hippie, neo-folk-listening, designer-facial-hair sporting, Darfur-genocide cause-of-the-month-championing bag of uninformed, poorly articulated rhetoric and ancient, atavistic, stinging insecurities. Like all of us, at least on that last part. That was a horrible, unwarranted bit of vitriol, on my part, wasn't it? I really should apologize.

I was surprised that they've been able to sign the likes of Paul McCartney with his new album, Memory Almost Full (the flagship song of which, "Dance Tonight," is featured in another lifestyle company's ads: Apple). As a matter of fact, though, McCartney has been so thrilled with the development, he immediately announced that he was going to do another deal with Hear.

Corporate creation of lifestyle image isn't exactly new development in mass advertising. It's been around since Nike's Air Jordan campaign, and probably much, much earlier, in some (comparatively abbreviated) form or another. What's new is the number of, and the vigor in which, brands have cultivated these lifestyle images - always pale, escapist, caricaturish shadows of real, messy life, I might add. There simply are no pedophiles in Starbucks. Nor do terrorists buy iPhones.

I don't want to use the word sad, really... perhaps melancholy is better. It's a melancholy feeling for me, that we as societers feel need to have organizations create these ready-made lifestyles and social spaces that we sense, are somehow absent. Lifestyles like the ones featured in Starbucks. Arenas of social interaction (versus alienation) like the ones suggested by Volkswagen ads. Are we yearning for lifestyles and social arenas of the good old days? (Or just inaccurate projections of the good old days by contemporary media? Fantasies, in other words?)

Not to suggest that I'm anti-corporation... I'm quite PRO-corporation, to be sure.

But something inside me recoils at the Snap-In Ready-Made Life ®. And it's not as simple as some personal insecurity on my part. I have some real concerns about how these life solutions will manifest themselves in the long term. I'm too tired to articulate them now, and they're too inchoate in any case for me to even hint at. I'll write about it some other time; and I'm sure that you're just on the end of your seats.

This has been a thoroughly crappy 251st blog post. I do apologize about that.

Hey, it's my 250th blog entry!

I had a strange dream yesterday. Our civilization had entered into a very advanced stage, one in which we could travel very quickly between star systems, and between galaxies. One of the recent discoveries that our civilization had made was that of a smooth, reflective, bowling-ball sized (and colored) shape object somewhere in space. One of the oddities about this object was that it appeared to be super-massive - in fact, trillions of times more massive than the entirety of the rest of the matter in the universe - and yet it exerted no (or very little) gravitational pull on surrounding objects. It was also known, somehow, that the sphere was at least partially hollow. As if the sphere were a container of some sort, for something - what it was was anyone's guess. In any case, the sphere was effectively immobile and impenetrable, and nobody knew why, or the reason (if any) for its existence.

Our military scientists, pragmatists they, were trying to figure out what to do with the object, but they first wanted to know what this thing actually was -- and the treasures it might contain inside. I gathered that they probably wanted to use it as a weapon. In order to infer what might be inside, they tried to use the following intuitive method: identify two points on the sphere. Any point that resides on the line segment (chord) connecting those two points necessarily must be inside the sphere, they reasoned. That makes sense, according to our normal expectations of geometry, if you think about it. Determining what points were inside of the sphere, it was thought, would help us understand more about its meaning.

As it turns out, though, another important discovery had been made about the universe. It turned out that our universe actually "wrapped around" - that is to say, if you were to start at point A, and you traveled in a certain direction, never wavering, for enough time, you would arrive back at point A. Much as if, if we start at a certain point A on the Earth's equator and walked due east, we would eventually circumnavigate the globe and reach point A again (assuming we could walk on water).

This discovery had profound implications on the discovery of the black sphere, as the scientists realized they would be able to construct not one, but two straight line segments (chords) connecting the two points on the surface. The logical conclusion was that, in fact, we were not able to make any conclusions about which side was the "inside" of the sphere, and which side was the "outside." In other words, it might be equally valid that it is we who are on the inside of the sphere, and the perceived contents of the sphere actually represented the whole outside environment of the sphere. We had found the boundary to our universe in this bowling-ball sized sphere.

It was postulated that perhaps the sphere was some sort of prison for our universe, placed in exile by a wary and vengeful super-civilization. Or perhaps we were in some sort of quarantine. Or maybe we were in some colossal, ant-farm-like terrarium experiment.

I woke up soon after that. Unfortunately, I can't remember any more of the details of this bizarre dream.

No more Mexican food before bedtime.

As a side note, I read an interesting article the other day claiming that scientists have determined that, in fact, our solar system is not part of the Milky Way! The matter in our system - including the Earth - originated from the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy - which is mid-collision with the Milky Way. For this reason, we're able to see a large part of the Milky Way. If this were not the case, we would be viewing the galaxy disc-on, and we probably would just see a very thin band of very bright stars. Interesting!

In fact, I wonder if these galaxy collisions are an important component to the rise of highly-intelligent life?

I picked this book up called The Heart of the World, just by chance, at the library a few weeks ago. It took me a while, but I finally finished it. It wasn't a light read, but it was extremely interesting. It's the true story of author Ian Baker's several trips to various points in Pemako, a "hidden land" in Tibet - parts of which have never (or extremely rarely) been visited by outsiders. There's a lot more to it than that, but Baker's descriptions of the natural beauty - and the wonderful people (and not so wonderful, including Tibetan poisoning cults - it's as bad as it sounds) is at turns extraordinarily riveting, bewildering, hilarious, sobering, disturbing, and sometimes, well, boring. But the interesting parts definitely made up for the boring ones.

Pemako, it is said, is a beyul - that is to say, a hidden region that exists simultaneously within the mind and within the landscape (and in neither, Buddhists might argue). The innermost parts of Pemako are said to especially be beyul. Part of the notion that Pemako exhibits beyul-like qualities surely lies, in part, to the presence of certain forest fungi:

Some of the mushrooms bursting from the ground looked clearly like psilocybin, a consciousness-altering fungus used by Mazatec shamans in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, to communicate with the spirit realm. When I'd first visited Nepal in 1977, the same psychotropic life forms sprouted from cow patties on the grass runway at the airport in Pokhara. Enterprising Nepali children collected them after the rains and sold them to unwary travelers. I put some into my pack for later evaluation.

There are many comparisons in the book between Pemako and the Garden of Eden. Some historians apparently placed Eden around the area of Pemako. As Baker writes, the tree of knowledge may not have been an apple tree at all - and there may be some actual historical - and scandalous! - basis for this Judeo-Christian myth:

The ancient life forms that Kawa Tulku was seeking recalled the Tree of Knowledge described in Genesis. The Bible is not specific about the nature of the tree, nor its fruit that "made [Adam and Eve] as gods, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:4) Long before apples were shown hanging from the mythic tree, the forbidden fruit was depicted as Amanita muscaria, as revealed in a thirteenth-century fresco on the wall of a ruined chapel in Plaincouralt, France, where the red-and-white flecked mushroom "is gloriously portrayed, entwined with a serpent, whilst Eve stands by holding her belly." The noted Bible scholar from Cambridge University who first published material on the subject claimed that: "The whole Eden story is mushroom-based mythology, not least in the identity of the 'tree' as the sacred fungus."

Here's that fresco, by the way. It turns out that there may be a lot more to this mushroom-Christianity link that one might first expect.

It's absolutely fascinating to me to consider the forces that must have been present, and the motivations, for the reshaping of this myth into its current form. Furthermore, this suggests that Adam and Eve's revelation was really just a trip on hallucinogenic mushrooms. I say just not because I'm denigrating the practice - after all, many cultures use hallucinogenic substances for religious purposes, and have done so for thousands of years - but it just seems like such a shock for it to appear in the (purported) puritanical aesthetics of Judeo-Christian theology.

Or maybe it's my own dormant puritanism that causes me to be shocked.

The other night I dreamt. It was the night before Independence Day, and it was twilight. I happened to be looking out the balcony window, and I heard - and felt - a rolling rumble. And then I saw a mushroom cloud, crystallizing from intense light, far in the distance.

Heather was there, and I alerted her to the new danger. I remember feeling so frustrated, because she believed it was merely fireworks. She laughed it off, and refused to go. She wouldn't even get up and look out the window.

I saw another mushroom cloud, growing, in the further distance. At least it was going away from us. I redoubled efforts to evacuate Heather - but vainly. She continued to laugh it off. I began to see the absurdity of the situation. Where would we go? We were as good as dead anyway; at best, we would suffer and soon die from a painful, cancerous radiation illness.

Curiously, I also remember my thoughts when I first saw the cloud. It wasn't, "Well, the terrorists have finally won." It also wasn't "Well, I guess China has attacked first." It went more along the lines of, "Well, (as in, America - not the world), we finally somehow managed to fuck it all up."

It's strange, the way high-stress situations - and dreams - will reveal your innermost beliefs to you. And how truly astonishing those beliefs can turn out to be.

Last week I was watching The Office or something, and I saw a car commercial I hadn't seen before. In it, a thief breaks into a Volkswagen Beetle and drives it around town. Everywhere he goes people smile at and wave to him. A little boy here, an older couple there. I suspect likely even an attractive young woman - though I can't actually remember. The viewer gets the sense that the thief develops a feeling of communion and general goodwill toward society - a feeling conspicuously absent before. The thief decides in the end to return the car. He has redeemed himself (though he elects not to subject himself to the legal consequences of taking the car in the first place), and walks off, one presumes, to live a better, happier life.

It's an effective campaign. Like many of its contemporaries, it works on one's emotions, and promotes a theme popular here in the West: redemption. Startlingly different, though, is that what is being sold is not a lifestyle of fashion, nor prestige. Instead, disturbingly, it's selling escape from social alienation - brought on in part, one might argue, by the advent of high technology, ironically.

I wish I could find the video online. It's really worth a viewing. If anyone sees it, please let me know and I'll post it.

I was thinking the other day about the way funny joke-riddles (as opposed to clever riddles - e.g. the riddle of the Sphinx - sorry, I couldn't think of any other way to designate them) often follow the same formulaic format. Something like:

Q: Why did the blonde keep a coat hanger in her back seat?
A: In case she locks the keys in her car.

Observe that, first of all, we commonly refer to the blonde (or the priest or the politician or the lawyer), as if there's some humor prototype for a blonde. A Platonic ideal - but just for ridicule and stereotypical reinforcement. I'm only sort of joking here -- I think something culturally deep is going on. It's as if, as a culture, we're aware of the roles that blondes, priests, and politicians, complete with their grotesque stereotypes, and we're constantly reinforcing them. This reinforcement somehow stimulates us - makes us feel like, yep, we really know what's going on with these "blondes,". We understand their essence.

The targets, and thus the purposes, of the the messages in these jokes is two-fold: for "blondes," it defines yet another recipe by which they may fulfill their designated roles. For non-"blondes,", it acts as a kind of shaming mechanism by which, if the "blondes" fulfill their roles too skillfully, as a society we reinforce their deeds amongst ourselves as too far outside the norm, and worthy of ridicule. Just look at Paris Hilton and the late night talk show hosts. Look at how the audience claps and cheers at Miss Hilton's (arguably deserved) misfortune. Generally, look at the targets of the late night hosts' jokes - though in these cases, abstract designations like "blondes" are discarded in favor of hyper-specific first and last names. Hosts are always taking aim at "someone who's gone too far," regardless of how arguably noble those targets have acted. Case in point: Angelina Jolie has adopted several children from impoverished backgrounds. By most accounts, these adoptions should and would be considered very noble deeds. And yet Jolie is often lampooned in the entertainment press. The court of public opinion is not only unfair and not only harsh: to be proven guilty in this court, one must only stray far enough outside of the sphere of normalcy. Or what passes for normalcy, given the times.

That was a bit of a digression, and I have one more point to make about these kinds of jokes. Have you noticed that the "Why did the" part normally comes at the beginning? I mean, I don't think we would ever see jokes of the form:

Q: The blonde kept a coat hanger in her back seat. Why?

I'm guessing jokes don't follow this form because the "Why did the" also serves the role of preparing us for the fact that, in fact, the following is a joke, and not a serious statement. Almost like the est-ce que, in French, indicates that the succeeding utterance is a question.

I sometimes hear people fondly wax reminiscent about their days scouting in their youth. Boy Scouts -- if you're an international reader, or have been living under a rock -- is a protomilitary organization in the United States that socializes its teenage members to be "good" American citizens (though the Boy Scouts exist in many countries other than the US, too). Truth, Justice, and The American Way and all that. In the U.S., the BSA exhorts its members to "do [their] duty, to God and [their] country." Scouts are supposed to be "trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent." I find it absurdly comical, in this day and age, that the organization expects that this little chant will imbue its reciters with said qualities. On the other hand, I still remember them. It would have been better, I think, if the scouting elders had selected their values to accord better with acronym-ization. A kind of ROY G. BIV of ethicality would have been nice.

I also remember that the values had an Official Name, though I don't remember what it actually was. Everything in scouting in the late 80s and early 90s, I remember, required an Official Name.

I remember my buddies in school - in another troop - at the time recounting the activities they had done and the memories they had made. I can't remember any of them now, except for a rather scarring warning from the scoutmaster about the dangers of shooting rubber bands across the room. It's always the gruesome things that stick with you. The scoutmaster's best friend's eye, it seemed, was once hit with a stray shot rubber band, knocking it out of the socket. Hmmm... BSA indeed.

I was in scouts myself, as you've surmised by now, though my experience was somewhat different. Every Tuesday night, I think. Or it may have been Thursdays. I remember having actual scouting activities for about half the time, and then the rest of the time we would play Smear the Queer on the muddy field outside. On several occasions, the scoutmasters neglected to show up, and so we played Smear the Queer for the whole time. That was like two hours. I was very often the queer.

Actually, despite the horrific name, Smear the Queer was a lot of fun. I was pretty good at it, but I was careful to avoid one kid. Daryl Hayden (not his real name), two years my senior and about twenty-five pounds heavier, took extra relish in tripping me, running into me, and tackling me to the muddy ground. Often, my throbbing head was painfully caked with dirt, rocks... on one occasion earthworms.

So I avoided that kid, as much as possible. But every time we played, I'd come away with at least one injury. Usually it was very bruised shins.

Once, my Dad asked me to identify the other kids in the troop. I don't remember the circumstances - maybe he picked me up from scouts or something, and he saw the other kids. I said to him, "That's so-and-so, and there's what's-his-face. Oh yeah, and over there is Daryl Hayden."

"Daryl Hayden!" My dad's eyes lit up. "I went to school with a guy named Hayden. Good guy!" There was a smile on his face as he told me an amusing story about the other Hayden. "Yeah, good old Hayden."

Thereafter, when I returned home from being subtly beaten up by Daryl Hayden, my dad would politely make an inquiry. "How's that Hayden doing?" he asked, smilingly. It was an embarrassing cut I frequently had to endure, but I was always too ashamed or too stupid to come clean about the whole matter, and so there was no way for my dad to know the truth. And I was much too much of a coward to tell either him or my mom. Or anyone.

" 'kay," I would respond noncommittally, in the way that, I figured out much later, really irritated my parents. Oops...

The never-ending fight for Truth, Justice, and The American Way is actually one of the slogans associated with Superman. Recently, I watched the latest in the film franchise, Superman Returns. Frankly speaking, that movie is a steaming pile of shit. Not even the usually excellent Kevin Spacey could give life to this film. The only interesting bit was when the Daily Planet's editor, Perry White, asserted Superman's commitment towards Truth, Justice, and all that stuff. What happened to the American Way? It turns out that its omission is no accident (the linked-to article, exactly one year old, provides some insight into some of the stated reasons for the omission; it also includes a lot of nationalistic stuff that I don't endorse). Here's perhaps a more fair and balanced article.

A couple of years after I ended scouting - I only lasted about a year - I was about ready to enter high school, and I got a measure of revenge. Or maybe not. I was extremely fortunate to get nearly all of my height by the time my freshman year began, and so I was rather taller than Daryl. So he didn't terrorize me. Or maybe he - and I - had just matured. Either way, we ended up being somewhat friends. Or perhaps cohorts in mischief is a more appropriate term.

I think I might offend a lot of people with this post. Some people take scouting very seriously, and have had really good, wholesome scouting experiences. And if you're one of those people: I envy you. But, you know, it certainly can be said that I learned a lot of lessons in my time as a scout. Just not the ones I was supposed to.

The other day or so, Heather and I went to this somewhat swanky place, adjacent to a golf course. We had some time to kill before our engagement for the evening commenced, so I asked Heather if we could perform a kind of an experiment on the car.

I had read somewhere on the Internet that it is possible to unlock your car door with a remote control entry device through the phone. This is useful, say, if you accidentally lock your keys in the car (but conveniently remember your cell) - you can call home, for example, and ask someone to press the button on your spare remote entry device -- if you have one. I asked Heather to stay by the car as I walked about, oh, maybe a football-field length away. I called her phone and repeatedly hit the "unlock" button. Five, maybe six times. Just to be sure.

"Did it work?" I asked after bringing the receiver back to my face - and motioning her to do the same.

"Yes, it did." Apparently she was as surprised as me: the remote-entry-device-through-the-phone urban legend was actually true.

"Here, let me try something else. Point the receiver towards the car again."

She did, and so I again aimed the car remote control into my phone's receiver, and pressed a different button.

I pressed again. And again. And again!

Finally, it worked. "Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!" the car intoned as it flashed its lights. I had hit the panic button.

Heather started walking towards me, shouting, with a furled brow, "How do you turn it off?" A man in his white golf uniform looked at us with dismay. I was laughing my head off; Heather had a somewhat different perspective on the matter.

"That was NOT a very funny joke," she told me as she pointedly walked past me. By this time, the panic had stopped; it had only gone on for four, maybe five seconds. Anyway, it was time for the events of the evening to get started, and I walked into the building with Heather with what must have looked like an inexplicable smile on my face.