Other: If I Ever Started a Band and Let the Internet Choose the Name...

Apparently, I've been "memetagged."

The rules:

1. Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random... Read More” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2. Go to "Random quotations" or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3. Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4. Put it all together.

5. Post it.

Just shoot me...

Riding the Rails: Day 3 Am I There Yet?

... Day 3 continued ...

I should say that I was actually really hungry by now. It was late afternoon, I'd basically had a bagel for breakfast and lunch combined, and I'm sure the whole thing was making me cranky, although Olivia could have tried the patience of a saint. The only restaurants I could see near the Winchester Mystery House were big sit-down chains, and I wasn't that desperate.

I got off the bus after a few miles at Saratoga. I had forgotten that the walk from here to Kinokuniya was more like a mile until I had been walking awhile. It was mostly what looked like an older residential area, although the ubiquitous new condos and giant apartment complexes were starting to show up. I knew I was going in the right direction, but still, I couldn't see anything ahead that looked like stores until... There it was! Yay! In a strip mall mainly of Japanese stores.

In square footage, it was definitely bigger than the Los Angeles store, but it wasn't as densely packed with bookshelves. The stationary section looked larger, the manga section definitely seemed larger after I'd circulated a few times, and the crafts section was... smaller? Yes, I traveled around the store multiple times to see if they'd hidden stuff, but there were only about two shelves of knitting/crochet books. I was sorely disappointed. They did have a knitting stitches book I'd been looking for, but they didn't have any amigurumi books. What? Then on yet another circuit, I noticed that they had a small display of amigurumi books, both Japanese and American (English) publications, on a table near the front. It was still only a fraction of the selection in Los Angeles, though, and they didn't have the new Hello Kitty book I had wanted. I suppose I could have asked about it, but I was hungry and tired, and, well, didn't really need to be going out of my way to spend more money.

In addition to the 300 knitting stitches book, I got a book of crochet motifs you work continuously instead of the more common, mind-numbing method of sewing finished pieces together one at a time. I also got an amigurumi book I hadn't seen before. It had a lot of charm-like patterns, and a pattern of a bumblebee man that reminded me of that character on Mexican TV. Bumblebee man has a little lady bug lady friend, too.

I walked along the strip mall and went into a ramen house. It was a hole-in-the-wall, I-wonder-what-grade-this-would-get-if-San-Jose-did-Los-Angeles-style-health-inspection-grades, no-maybe-I-don't-want-to-know joint, but it was pretty crowded and no one keeled over while I was there. I looked at the menu, but all the ramen had pork (there was even a note -- "All ramen dishes have pork") and I don't eat mammals, so I got a boiled chicken salad with kimchi. The kimchi had completely drained my sinuses after about 3 bites. It was hot, but it was good, and the chicken had a good curry sauce on it.

I felt much better with food in my stomach. I was still tired, though, and the sun was beginning to get lower in the sky. I walked back down to the bus stop, which didn't seem so far away this time, and the bus came about 5 minutes later. I rode back to the light rail station where I had caught the first bus, and then waited about 15 minutes for a northbound train.

Riding the Rails: Day 3 Darwin In Action

... Day 3 continued ...

Our guide for the Winchester Mystery House Mansion Tour turned out to be a 12-year-old boy. Ok, I should be talking, since I look a fair deal younger than I am, so I'll give him a little credit and say he's 15, but not a day over. He had the script down, though, and could deliver it at about 120 miles-per-hour. He talked so fast that we ended up having to wait multiple times for the group ahead of us to move, and he wasn't even trying to rush us physically. You could tell as soon as he was asked a non-FAQ and had to go off the script. He stopped the sing-song recitation and started speaking at a more normal speed, interjecting the word "like" every sixth word or so. I don't mean to imply he seemed bored with his job or anything, because I didn't get that impression.

I'm not going to describe the house much, except to say that Sarah Winchester was rather crazy and also should not have been acting as her own architect. Also, if you ever go on the tour, particularly if it's the least bit cool outside, bring something warm to wear. I couldn't figure out why some parts of the house were so chilly, then it dawned on me. A lot of exterior walls had no insulation whatsoever. There was just the one layer of wood boards.

While there were many lovely stained glass windows and a number of oddities, the thing I will never forgot about the tour is Olivia. No, Olivia was not a Winchester, and she's not a ghost at the house. Well, not yet, anyway. Olivia was a little girl, maybe 3 years old, on the tour. I know her name quite well because her parents were forever saying, "Olivia, come here. Don't run ahead, Olivia. Come back here to mommy and daddy, Olivia."

Let me explain two things here. The first one is what I call "Darwin In Action," sort of my personal version of the Darwin Awards. Bus Person Car is one variation. However, I've seen some parents allow if not encourage ("hey, kid, let's jaywalk in the middle of the block here on this busy street after dark!" -- seen it) their young children to attempt to take themselves out of the gene pool. Unfortunately, that would rarely solve the problem, as the parents are generally not placing their own further reproductive abilities at risk. Who knows, maybe there's some "Bad Seed" action here I don't know about it. I may be flip about it, but it would really piss me off if I had to witness something predictably horrible actually coming to fruition.

The second thing: the Winchester Mystery House can be dangerous if a person doesn't pay attention to where they're going. Someone not paying attention can damage something old and irreplaceable, get lost, or trip and fall and seriously injure themselves. This is most definitely not a place where you'd want a 3-year-old darting around out of sight of her parents. Well, unless you were her parents and you somehow weren't too averse to the idea of losing her.

Except that was exactly how Olivia's parents were acting. They were taking turns carrying an infant who was about 12-months old. This presumably would have left the hands of the other parent free to, oh, I don't know, hold on to Olivia. But, no, the kid kept skittering between people without looking where she was going, bumping into them, scaring the hell out of me when I was bumped in the knee not because I thought it was a ghost, but because I was picturing what my prison sentence would be like if I went to the root of the problem and throttled her dumbass parents.

So, while they would be calling out, "Olivia, come back here," in a completely unthreatening, "there aren't really any repercussions if you don't come back here because we're the type of parents who don't believe in really punishing our children, because we're dumbasses who want to raise good-for-nothings with a limitless sense of entitlement or even just total sociopaths, and then we seem bewildered when we end up on a nanny reality TV show," Olivia usually didn't pay much attention, and neither of the parents made an effort to go get her and keep a hold on her. They were also pretty oblivious when the baby they were holding would reach over her parent's shoulder and try to grab at the priceless, earthquake-damaged, "please don't lean on the walls" wallpaper, which was actually within her short little arm's reach. I realize little kids are into everything and it can be easy to lose track sometimes, but that's not really an excuse not to try to keep them out of anything they shouldn't be doing.

Finally, about 50 minutes into the 65-minute tour, Olivia had run ahead of the guide, and we could see her through a glass wall as she went around a corner and just kept on going ahead. At this point the mother told the father, "I'm going to go grab her hand." I would have seriously considered banging my head against the wall if it hadn't been covered in priceless wallpaper.

Somehow, Olivia got out of the house alive, when the house could so easily have added a brand new ghost to its collection. Darwin must have been busy elsewhere.

I really should have put something about "regular child-free tours" in the suggestion box in the gift shop. Instead I bought Brad a snow-globe magnet (I seriously doubt it has actually snowed on the house itself more than about half a dozen times in 125 years) for feeding the fuzzies in my absence. Then I walked back to the catch the same bus that had gotten me there so I could go further west to the San Jose Kinokuniya. I had to wait forever for the bus, and this stop didn't have a bench. Whine.

to be continued some more....

Riding the Rails: Day 3 VTA Fun

I slept like a log, woke up, and took forever to get my butt in gear. I finally made it out the door a few minutes after noon and walked down the dumbass undulating sidewalk to the Karina Station, no shortcuts this time. I bought a VTA day pass for $5 from the machine, but then I had to wait a bit for a southbound Mountain View-Winchester train, as the trains don't run as often on Saturdays. There were two trains to Santa Teresa before mine came.

When I got on, there was a man and his young daughter sitting in front of me. A small, plastic, suction-cup-handed Spiderman hung from the window we shared. I didn't know if it was hers or not, but I thought that was an awesome idea for a random thing to do; buy a bunch of cheap suction-cup toys and stick one on bus and train windows and leave them. I was a little disappointed when the girl pulled it off the window and took it with her when they got off, implying it had been hers all along.

I was even more disappointed when an obnoxious young couple took their seats. The guy said something which I wouldn't have noticed, except the girl started saying, "NOOO-oooh" over and over again. I realized it was the same way I said "No" to Spoon when he was clearly thinking about doing something Bad. (He's pretty transparent.) Two beats, high then a couple steps lower, with a glissando between the two pitches. By the time she had said this half a dozen times without pause, I wanted to start using my Spoon voice back on her. She kept picking at him about one thing or anything, but the real coup de grâce, or should I say, coup de ass, came when she stood up to leave. Thrilled that they were getting off, I was looking with glee at her back moving away, when I realized a full inch of butt crack was staring at me. And we're not talking about a woman who should have been wearing ultra-low-rise jeans in the first place, but seriously, put a goddamned belt on. Now, I know you're thinking you really didn't want to hear this, but I had to see it, so just deal with it.

The train finally got to my stop, which was apparently in the middle of New Condo Land. Then I had to catch the VTA 25 bus west to get to the Winchester Mystery House. Of course, I got to watch one go by kitty corner as soon as I got off the train (just like home!), which meant I had to wait another 20 minutes for the next one. This is one of the reasons I bring reading material with me wherever I go. My brain has the attention span of a 3-year-old, and if I don't have something to keep it busy, it tries to drive me crazy.

The bus came pretty much on time and looked like from the outside pretty much the same size and type as the basic Metro locals. When I got on, though, the internal layout was the same, too, but the seats... they had actual padding! Not foam that had maybe been ¼" thick when new but had been compressed down to ¹⁄₁₆" over time, but at least an inch of foam! The next surprise came a few minutes later. A pre-recorded announcement told the passengers to wait until the bus had come to a complete stop before trying to get out of their seat and go to the door! Crap, you do that on Metro, you're lucky if you get to the door before the stop after yours!

Anyway, it got to my stop, then I walked across I-880 and a couple blocks to the Winchester Mystery House. From my hotel to there was a total travel time of about 2 hours. About a third of that was probably my bad timing where I ended up waiting, but I didn't really mind, because I had brought the book. I bought my Mansion Tour ticket and then waited a couple of minutes for my tour to start.

to be continued...

Riding the Rails: Day 1 Addendum

A couple things I forgot to mention about the train ride up to San Jose:

• Somewhere past Santa Barbara but still in view of the coast, there was a pen with some grazing horses, and, were those llamas? Alpacas? Or was I just looking at them from an odd angle? Their heads looked too small proportionally to be equine, and their necks a little too long. Either way, they were just hanging out with their horses, neither too disturbed by the other.
• My seatmate Jim told me about an incident on his ride down where the train just stopped in the middle of nowhere. No station, nothing. Apparently some asshole had been trying to put the mack on some woman without either noticing or caring that she would rather eat glass than have anything to do with him. Finally she complained to a conductor (I probably would have kneed him in the groin first, but who knows), and they radioed ahead and the police met them, well, in the middle of nowhere, escorting the asshole off the train.