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Last night, Sarah and I took in Chicago: The Musical at a local theatre.Given the quality of Chicago the movie, we both had high expectations for the stage production.

After the show ended last night, both Sarah and I felt the movie was much better.

The movie did a great job cutting the fat from the play. There were numerous musical numbers that little to nothing to advance the story or develop characters. Mary Sunshine’s number, for instance, was a complete waste of time and talent. In addition, the musical number, “Class” seemed designed to bulk up the second act a bit. You know a musical number is extraneous when I lean over to Sarah during a long dance scene and mutter, “gratuitious music video,” a catch phrase we usually use when discussing music video filler sandwiched into a feature film.

While the play was laden with low-quality filler, the movie improved the source material by cutting all the fat and leaving the muscle and bone. The musical numbers left in the film are all high quality numbers that help to advance the story of develop characters. The medium of film, where running times are generally shorter than that of musical theatre, actually helped to improve the source material.

<SPOILER> In addition, the play’s goofy gimmick that Mary Sunshine is actually a man in disguise is ridiculous. Maybe that shocked people in the Twenties, but it is a tired contrivance these days.</SPOILER>

In addition, many of the musical numbers in the movie had more pop. The number “Cell Block Tango” was greatly improved in the movie version. The addition of the red and white scarves, while simple, was a fantastic visual addition to the otherwise sparse staging. There is no reason that the play couldn’t adopt something similar for that number.

That’s not to say that play has nothing on the movie. It’s clear from watching the movie that the director and producers went out of their way to protect Catherine Zeta-Jones’ limited singing and dancing ability wherever possible. By comparison, the woman playing Velma Kelly last night clearly was a superior singer and dancer.

Ultimately, we were disappointed that we shelled out nearly fifty bucks a seat for a show that seemed off in nearly every respect. It would not be inaccurate to say that we enjoy the DVD of the movie more than we enjoyed watching the show last night.

Unlike many other places in the world, Halloween in Madison is primarily an adult event.Our first year in Madison, we bought many bags of candy because we expected to be innundated with trick or treaters like we were in California. That turned out to be a huge mistake as perhaps seven or eight kids came to our door. We wrote that off as a consequence of living in a relatively secluded neighborhood populated with older folks and few kids.

Once we moved to our current home, we expected the situation to change. An elementary and middle school is just two blocks to our west. Another school is a long walk to the south east. In addition, there are plenty of kids in the neighborhood.

Our first Halloween in our home, we bought a fair amount of candy, but less than we might have if we still lived in California. That year, something like fifteen kids that rang our doorbell. When we barely managed to polish off our Halloween candy by Christmas we vowed to never again purchase more than a single bag of candy for Halloween.

This year, we bought a smattering of candy (primarily ones that we like) and took bets on how many trick or treaters would ring our doorbell. My guess was seven. Sarah’s was five. The first kid to ring our doorbell (and receive Dalla’s full warning bark fury) was a former neighbor. The next four kids stopped by in two pairs. That was that. Sarah guessed correctly with a grand total of five kids stopping by to ask for candy. Lame.

Contrast that with the celebration downtown for college students and young adults. Tens of thousands of people come from all over the nation to take part in Madison’s Halloween party downtown. The event is completely unsanctioned and unsponsored, but that doesn’t mean nobody is going to show up. The last two years, the event ended with Riot Lite. That is, police spraying tear gas and pepper spray while some store windows get broken and a few bonfires get set. This year, the event ended with riot police and pepper spray, but no real property damage. Despite the best (and somewhat misguided) efforts of the local authorities he party continues unabated.

Football fans already know the subject of this particular article: the Minnesota Vikings.Anyone exposed to a newspaper sports section, ESPN, or Fox Sports over the past few weeks has probably heard every possible way to work a nautical reference into a sportscast. It’s gotten so bad that even NBA articles in Sports Illustrated reference the Vikings’ notorious naval adventures.

I’m going to sail past any easy digs at the Purple and Gold’s off-field misadventures (after that one, of course) and analyze the team itself.

Mike Tice – As much as I was willing to give Tice the benefit of the doubt years ago, it is now time for him to go. Even if he is the second coming of Parcells, Belicheck, or Walsh, his image in Minnesota is forever tainted. He will forever have problems getting and retaining respect amongst Minnesota fans.

Offensive Line – The offensive line is easily the worst part of the team. It should be no surprise that it is such awful shape. The past few years Culpepper has scrambled for his life time and time again. It was only his talent that kept opposing defenses from burying him under the Dome’s turf. With the line’s best player (Birk) sidelined, the weakness of the line has been truly exposed this year. The right tackle, Rosenthal, has been exposed (again) this year as an awful signing. He isn’t any better than any old guy we could have drafted in the past few years but we’re paying him significantly more than we would a rookie. The guards, for all their mobility, might as well be concrete pylons placed on either side of the center. In addition, they aren’t particularly good just going straight ahead, either. The left tackle, McKinnie is a bust. The line on him is that he’s got the talent; my line is that he refuses to show it consistently. We can’t keep paying a guy who plays ten plays a game and just happens to be on-field in uniform for the rest. The center position is another disaster. Withrow was a failure; Fowler isn’t much better.

Wide Receiver – Burleson is decent, but I haven’t anything from him that makes me think he’s going to be great. He might be good, but he’ll never scare defenses like Moss did. Marcus Robinson was a stiff when the team signed him two years ago. He hasn’t gotten any better in the intervening time. Koren Robinson hasn’t been on the field enough yet to see his potential as a receiver. Williamson hasn’t shown much beyond one or two catches. Wiggins runs like he’s got an angry badger in his pants, but somehow he’s nearly always open. Kleinsasser is a punishing blocker, but isn’t much of a receiving threat.

Running Back – Mewelde Moore is the team’s best running back at this point. Though he’s not fast, he’s shifty and difficult to tackle. Moe Williams is the clear number two back. Michael Bennett is a stiff. He can’t move laterally and his speed is worthless since he can’t get out into the open field.

Defensive Line – One of the few areas the team improved over last year. Pat Williams has been a huge improvement over the twin do-nothings the team trotted out the last few years. Kevin Williams would be dominant if he saw fewer double teams. Even so, he is still often the team’s best lineman. Erasmus James hasn’t seen the field enough for us to see if he’s any good. (Obligatory tangent: James is routinely, and unfairly, blamed for causing Michael Vick’s knee injury during the Atlanta game. If you watched the replay, you’d see that Vick’s knee was actually injured when he went to plant his foot several second prior to James’ hit. In the replay you’ll see him plant his right foot, and though he takes several “steps” afterwards, they are really just hops on his left foot. He never puts his weight on his right leg after that plant. It is only after those hop-steps on his left foot that Vick gets hit by James.)

Linebackers – Stiffs, sloth-like, mentally suspect, or all of the above.

Safeties – If Darren Sharper was any good wouldn’t it make sense that Green Bay would have wanted him back? Chavous is serviceable, but I doubt that offensive coaches stay up the night before the game planning for him. He’s not a devastating hitter, nor is he particularly fast.

Cornerbacks – Smoot is certainly an improvement over the Cast of Thousands that have broken fans’ hearts over the past few years. Of course, he’s also now forever linked to the Love Boat fiasco. Winfield was good last year, and he’s been good enough this year that offenses generally haven’t thrown too much his way. Ralph Brown? He must have some really great blackmail material on someone in the Vikings front office.

Kickers – Sign Chris Kluwe to a long-term deal. Now. I’m still not sold on Edinger. Yeah, he won the game last week, but he also has a history of missing field goals. Again, if he was any good doesn’t it make sense that Chicago would have wanted him back? Retread kickers, with a few exceptions, don’t have a great history in the league.

Ever since I heard about it, I’ve been very interested to read Sarah Vowell’s book, Assassination Vacation. When my name finally floated up to the top of the library’s reservation queue, I rushed over to check out a copy.The book covers a bit of Vowell’s fascination with the assassinations of American Presidents. Apparently, she spends a good portion of her time traveling around the nation visiting sites both closely and tangentially related to the dead and their killers.

Quite frankly, the book isn’t nearly as funny as I expected that it would be. Given Vowell’s funny and insightful stories and commentary on This American Life, I expected that her writing would closely mirror her radio work.

Unfortunately, while her writing is insightful and interesting, it just isn’t very funny. Even though I could hear her distinctive voice in my head while reading the book, the text on the page just didn’t strike me as unceasingly funny.

While the book isn’t likely to supply a laugh trck to a hit sitcom any time soon, I would still recommend it. Vowell’s commentary on how American society produces, nutures, and then shuns assassins is insightful. Her abbreviated history of how McKinley and Garfield were first elected, and then gunned down is something that most people probably don’t know. If nothing else, readers can get an easy-to-swallow dose of American history from reading the book.

Starting 10 October 2005, I will report for duty at a new job.A couple of months ago I was contemplating how my business was working out. Fundamentally, it had three problems:

1. I wasn’t making nearly enough money.
2. The easiest way to increase my cash flow was also the least appealing.
3. The most interesting work was also the work nobody would pay me to do.

As much as I like the challenge of freelance writing, almost nobody would pay me to do it. I had several close calls with near-subsistence pay in the writing world, but they never worked out. For instance, I started working with one of the local newspapers last December towards increasing their local technology coverage. Part of this effort was creating a dedicated Technology page that would run once a week. Earlier this year, they offered me a column on that page, and naturally, I accepted. Then, the column was yanked, and I was given a job writing a feature story every week. Fine. But even though I’ve written several things for them, not one has ever seen print. The crew putting together the Technology page (which doesn’t yet exist) is either too busy or too disinterested to actually get the Technology page off the ground. So, nearly one year later, there is no Technology page and I can’t wait for it any longer.

My consulting business also had problems. The clients I could get were the clients I didn’t want. They were the clients with just one or two computers who weren’t interested in any sort of complex computing environment. Quite frankly, I can’t blame them. Most two person lawyer’s offices don’t need a the digital horsepower of clustered Linux servers or a distributed computing environment. So, I was doing work that I didn’t like in the least.

In addition, smaller clients need help relatively infrequently, so you need a very large number of them to pay the bills. That means lots and lots of work I don’t like.

Finally, other considerations came into play like the availibilty of health insurance. At the moment, I’m on Sarah’s insurance through the University. However, if her appointment is not renewed at the end of December, we would then be facing a monthly bill of $600 for health insurance. That’s a huge amount of money; more than half of our monthly mortgage payment, by comparison. So, I needed to get a job for the health insurance and the steady paycheck.

Monday will see me reporting for work at the IceCube project. IceCube is a scientific project dedicated to building a neutrino detector below the Antarctic ice. The UW-Madison is the lead agency so the project’s headquarters is located in downtown Madison.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some interesting consulting for a few West Coast clients. I’m hoping to continue that work even after I start this new job. In addition, I’ll still keep trying to build up my writing credits as I can in my off hours.

I don’t really see this as an end to building my own business. I see it as a time to gather my wits, do some better research, and look for a stronger market while working on an interesting project and pulling in a regular salary.

You’re probably wondering, “In what sorts of subversive activities have David and Sarah been engaged these last couple of weeks?”

Well, I can’t spill those secrets here. What I can do is tell you how we filled some our hours.The week before last, we left Madison a bit early on a Friday and went hiking at Brooklyn Wildlife Area. There must be some good reason why the Wildlife Area is named after the town of Brooklyn, rather than the town of Belleville, but I don’t see it. Belleville is right around the corner. The Town of Brooklyn is reasonably far away. It makes no sense. Sarah and I have even gone so far as to abbreviate the name to “Belleville.” If we talk about going hiking in Belleville, we’re certainly not about to lace up our boots and hit the mean streets of Belleville, the city, but rather the Brooklyn Wildlife Area.

Now that that’s clear, I can write about our most recent trip. For a change, the weather turned crisp and sunny that day. We were both itching to hit the trail and Dalla is always more than willing to go along. We hiked for a while over hill and dale and marshy trail. A new pump has been installed at the confluence of two trails so we sampled the water. I was pleasantly surprised that the water had little to no metallic taste. After drinking from the pump, we gathered some flowers and leaves. We were seeking inspiration from nature to help us decide what colors to paint on the outside of our house. On the way back to the trailhead, we stopped and ate apples from a tree growing near the trail. Dalla likes apples, so she got to sample one, too. By the time we were nearing the trailhead, the sun was sinking below the distant hills, so a wonderful light was cast over everything. It was a great end to a good hike.

If you’re interested, we took a few photos of our hike.

Thursday of last week, I accompanied Sarah to Effigy Mounds National Monument to help her with part of the field work for her Masters thesis. She is attempting to find out the pre-historical fire frequency for the park so that the park’s naturalists can use fire to help return the park’s vegetation to a pre-colonization state. To get this fire data, she pulls mud cores out of a pond at the park, radiocarbon dates the mud in the cores, counts the charcoal and pollen in the cores, and then calculates dates and fire frequency from those numbers. Her previous coring expedition in 2004 failed to get deep enough into the ground to get pre-historical mud; we were going back with more and better equipment to drill deeper into the earth.

Sarah needed to core Founder’s Pond, which is a good-sized pond located inside the Monument. Founder’s Pond can only be reached by two methods:

1. Put canoes into the Yellow River and paddle downstream for a 1/2 mile or so. Portage the canoes across an isthmus roughly 50 yards wide and covered with stinging nettles that separates the two bodies of water.
2. Drive an all-terrain vehicle down something that only vaguely fits the definition of “road.” Then, either scramble down a short but steep and slippery slope to reach the water or walk several hundred yards of gently sloping but nettle-infested woods to the pond.

We needed two canoes for the coring work itself, so we needed to use method one. However, we had several hundred pounds of gear and we didn’t want to portage all of that gear. So, six people took the two canoes down the stream and portaged them across the isthmus. The NPS naturalist working with Sarah drove an all-terrain vehicle down the so-called road. We met him at the bottom of the hill on the opposite side of the pond. We then shuttled all the gear down the slippery slope from the road and into the canoes before paddling out on to the ponds.

We couldn’t have asked for a nicer day to work on a pond. The weather was in the upper sixties and lower seventies; there was a periodic gentle breeze; the sun was shining but not oppressive. We didn’t even see any mosquitos until the sun was nearly down and we were packing up to go home.

Sarah had a platform that we used to bridge the two canoes which created something like a pontoon boat. The platform was made out of wood which was clamped to each canoe’s gunwales. The platform also has a hole in its middle that allows the corer to be driven down between the two canoes. I was very skeptical of this arrangement as it seemed likely to cause both boats to swamp. However, the platform was extremely sturdy and stable. At one point, we had five adults on the platform (three men; two women), with four of us straining mightily against the corer in an effort to get it unstuck from a thick, uncooperative clay layer. Nobody had any worries that the platform was going to fail and dump us all in the drink; we were far more worried about how we were going to get that corer out of the clay layer in which it was stuck.

In the end, it was a long, but very productive day. Sarah got the corer something like 25 feet into the ground on this latest expedition. Her first trip only got a bit over six. Just looking at the cores coming out of the ground with the naked eye showed how much there was for her to discover. The ground changed colors and textures several times. As we got the later and deeper cores out of the ground, we started to see more and more shells in the cores. The last core was that tough clay layer which we penetrated only with hard work and the help of a post driver. It took the better part of a half-hour to then get the corer out of the clay layer and back to the surface.

We took some photos of the trip for those interested parties.

Over the weekend, we picked apples at a local pick-your-own apple farm. Between the two of us, we picked somewhere around 28 pounds of apples. I made an apple crisp last night. I’ll probably make another one tomorrow night. We’re eating apples after every meal and the piles don’t seem much smaller. The proverbial doctor will not be visiting our house any time soon.

We’ve also been struggling to give away some of the produce from our community garden plot. The hot pepper plants we planted absolutely loved the hot summer we had. I’ve given hot peppers away to everyone I know will take them and I still have more than I can eat. I even took them to a local dog park and tried to give them away there. As you can see in the picture to the left, I still have plenty of hot peppers. And, when I get rid of those that are pictured, at least twice as many will be ripe on the plants at our garden.

The drought we had over the course of the summer has slackened a bit in recent weeks. While we are now getting more rain, the temperatures have not relented much. Today, the temperature is 85°(!) with plenty of humidity to thicken the oppressive air. For someone like myself who prefers fall much more than summer, this extended summer weather is particularly galling.

“I am a stranger in a strange town, and the man standing beside me has just removed his pants.”

Thus opens Michael Perry’s latest book, Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets, and Gatemouth’s Gator.Unlike Perry’s last book, Population 451: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, Off Main Street is a collection of previously published material. Much of the work was published in the mid to late Nineties in a variety of periodicals.

Perry is a salt-of-the-earth writer. He appreciates truckers, country music, hunting, and home cooking far more than he appreciates the nodding approval of coastal book critics. His style is a curious mix of everyday slang and those relatively uncommon words–like “perspicacity”–writers love to sprinkle in their works to flex their linguistic muscles.

In general, this book is much weaker than Population 451. That’s less an indictment of this book that it would seem; it is more praise for the earlier book. Population 451 was a very compelling work and one that I would recommend to nearly anybody.

Perry’s evolution as a writer can be seen when one compares some of the earlier essays in this collection with his later essays and books. The lack of a unifying theme also seems to hurt his writing as many of his essays sound particularly preachy when they don’t have as much room to stretch out and find their center.

That’s not to say that Perry’s work is worth skipping entirely. He does have some cogent things to say. His writing about the 9/11 attacks could very well be applied to the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast today:

[T]he battle will not always live up to the telethon. Resolutions of substance generally require heavy lifting and extended attention to the mundane.

His essay detailing his battle with a kidney stone is both wince and grin inducing.

[W]hen I looked across the median of I-80 during a recent road trip and saw a westbound semi emblazoned with the words American Kidney Stone Management, I got so misty I nearly left the roadway. Somewhere out there someone else was gasping like a scuppered carp, and here, apparently piloted by angels, was a white Kenworth, its hood ornament aimed at kidney stones everywhere. Sweet, sweet relief, hammer down.

There is something about Perry’s writing that makes me feel like I’m curled up on a sofa in a remote mountain cabin reading before a wood fire while snow gently falls outside. Perhaps it’s his subject matter; perhaps it is the fact I know he writes from his home in northwestern Wisconsin. That is a mystery I have yet to solve.

Regardless, I recommed that you read this book if you need a few generally well-written essays to bridge the long, upcoming winter to next spring.