Some random notes, while I'm here:

--Hee-ho, 78 new photos at my Flickr account today! This seems to be following a trend I've set since starting up the Movable-Type-powered version of my blog, earlier this summer; namely, I'm getting to the internet cafe a lot less often (which is good, because it means less money spent on my part), so am tending to save things up now and post them en-masse when a desktop is needed. (And sure, I have the ability to upload Flickr photos through email, which works great, but doesn't let me assign tags or sort them into slideshows. And usually I could do this afterwards by logging on through my mobile browser, but for some reason Flickr uses these weird cookies that don't recognize mobile devices, so you can't actually log in. Which is a shame, because places like Gmail and Bloglines seem to have cookies that work with mobile devices just fine, so I'm not sure what Flickr's problem is.)

Anyway, you can click here for photos from the open house at the Lillstreet Center for applied arts; here for shots from the "City of Destiny" reading event at Quimby's bookstore; here for pics of me helping my friend Meg put together a huge-ass stage for the benefit of the Mudqueens of Chicago; and here for the other random photos I took around Chicago in August.

--Okay, so Jennifer Aniston is in Chicago right now, filming a movie, although I'm not sure for how much longer. And, you know, Jennifer's single now, and I'm single, and we're around the same age, and there's really no reason at all that we shouldn't have a drink or two together one night, because I think she and I would find each other very interesting company. So on a complete and total whim, I thought I'd mention it here at my journal - that I would like to have a drink soon with Jennifer Aniston - just in case someone here is a friend of a friend who hangs out with Jennifer, or is part of the production crew or whatever. Granted, the chances of this actually leading me to having a drink with Jennifer are slim to none; but Jesus, how fucking notorious would I automatically become if it did, man? And I really do think that Jennifer and I would have this really fun evening if we hung out - so, you know, Jennifer, drop me a line already!

--There's this tip I picked up in a bicycling pamphlet earlier this summer that's turned out to be really useful, and I've been meaning to mention it. It's the "forty foot" tip, which basically urges you as an urban bicycler to develop a constant conscious awareness of what's always happening about forty feet in front of you, or about four car lengths. This has turned out to be a great tip for me, because you just wouldn't believe how many people in parked cars don't think to look for bicyclers before swinging open their doors, or how many pedestrians are about to jaywalk and don't think of looking for bicyclers before stepping out suddenly between two parked cars. And four car lengths (easily measured when you're on a city sidewalk, full of parallel-parked cars) is just long enough I need to safely come to a stop or swerve around them in these cases (which, seriously, happens like ten times per bike trip I make), while still having time to look behind me, to make sure I'm not going to smash into a moving car by making the swerve, or have another bicycler crash into me from behind by stopping. It's a great simple way for urban bicyclers to avoid a lot of potentially messy situations, so I just wanted to share it with others who hadn't heard of it yet.

--I finally saw Rene Clair's 1945 adapation of the Agatha Christie thriller And Then There Were None (also known as Ten Little Indians), which I've been wanting for years and years to see. ATTWN was actually the very first Agatha Christie novel I read, back when I was like 14 or so, and lead me to reading a whole string of like twenty or them or so during high school, simply because I liked that first one so damn much. This particular story combined with this particular 1945 production, in fact, was the combination that established so many of the conventions in murder mysteries that are now cliches - the giant Victorian mansion on a stormy night, a group of diverse characters who seem only tenuously connected at first, this needlessly complicated scheme to knock them off one by one, devised by some mysterious vigilante taking ironic justice into their own hands. The synchronous lightning and thunder whenever something dramatic is announced. ("Ladies and gentlemen, one of us is the killer!" KER-CRASH!) The ingenious murders of each character, one at a time, in ways that no one can figure out until the end of it all. It was this particular story and production that not only provided most of the jokes of the brilliant '70s Neil Simon spoof Murder by Death, but also most of the structure of the board game Clue.

So it was cool to finally see the infamous production, although of course as always got a little sick of the hackneyed conventions of '40s filmmaking on display there (the goofy soundtracks, the short scenes that fade out at the end, the mostly cardboard-cutout characters, and of course all that artificiality to compensate for filmmaking limitations). Still, though, a pretty great production for what they had available, and still able to deliver some legitimate chills at points.

--There are, of course, two types of life-changing inventions: those that are big and profound and change everything at once (the atomic bomb, the automobile, the camera), and those that are merely supplements to our lives, designed for pedestrian uses (the toaster, the floppy disk, the washing machine) that nonetheless change our lives just as profoundly. And can we now all agree that the mobile expansion card should be added to this list of profound "quiet" inventions? I have a Palm Treo, of course, which uses the SanDisk (SD) format, and then I also have a card reader that plugs into USB ports, and runs off that generic USB driver that ships with all new Mac and Windows OS builds. And man, let me tell you, this thing has become an indispensable part of my life! Most of the time it's in my Treo, which is what lets me download things from the internet, post photos to my blog, and listen to podcasts on the go; then it plugs into my desktop at home, so I can transfer files I've downloaded either directly or at an internet cafe earlier that day with my card reader; then of course I can upload files from my desktop, to take to internet cafes and send to others (like how I do the business plan for the arts center I'm trying to open these days); then I have a standalone version of the Firefox browser on my card as well, one designed expressly to be run off an expansion card, so I can save all my bookmarks and passwords and take it from one borrowed/rented computer to the next; and then, of course, the card fits into my Epsilon digital camera as well, so that the photos from that can hop easily from device to device too.

Man, not even five years ago I used to pray for such a device to exist; so I'm very happy, needless to say, that I now own one, and think they deserve more respect than the cheap, useful devices usually get. So salut, all you hardworking expansion-device innovators, toiling away in relative obscurity while all those flashy AJAX fucks at Google get all the attention and babes. You are much appreciated.