travel and feasting! who does not like that?

i had a lovely dinner with rwx last night at The Beach Chalet, one of my favorite places to take people. he was duly impressed by the beer, the food, and the view. oh, and the lamps. ikkyu2 should be sure to ask him about the lamps. we enjoyed much conversation on many topics, as tends to happen when rwx is around, and generally had a great time. although i'm not sure he was very comfortable in my car. now, the 2001 Civic was redesigned to have a lot more head, leg, and elbow room, and seems very roomy and pleasant to me. rwx, however, looked rather like a sardine jammed into an already-full can.

now, to put this in perspective, while i'm not the incredible hulk, i'm far from petite. i'm 5'6" and weigh somewhere around 195 lbs. at the moment, and the only car i've had that was roomier than this one on the inside was my big old boat of an El Camino. as i said, plenty of elbow room, plenty of head room, etc.

rwx is a very large man, in every dimension. one forgets, until in his presence again, just exactly how large. and aside from being built like a locomotive, he also has Presence, with a capital P. it is easy to understand why people find him intimidating.

which is why i find it so mind-boggling when he tells me i "look kind of scary".

now, i don't generally like being around people who are much larger than i am, probably because in my family, i'm practically a midget. both my parents are 5'10" (my mother is also enormously obese and i inherited my own tractor-like build from my dad, who could easily palm my head) and my brother is 6'3", so i grew up being the short one. and out in the world -- especially in the bay area, with our enormous ethnic population -- i often feel nigh-enormous by comparison to other people, simply because they're not as much bigger than me as my family is. so when i do encounter people who are that much bigger than me, it brings up childhood associations, most of which are bad, and i tend to be a little afraid of them.

rwx, however, is such a generally good-natured guy that he doesn't make me nervous at all. not that i'd want to be between him and someone he wanted to kill, because he'd trample me like a herd of bison.

anyway, rwx is good people, and a fine dining companion. also he'd be handy to have around if you needed someone torn limb from limb.

random thought of the day

on my way to work, i was listening to NPR, and they were interviewing some neuroethicists about possible future developments in neurology and what that means for the future of humanity. at one point they started talking about the possibility of altering human brains in various ways for special purposes.

this naturally led to thoughts of how silly it is that when superheroes or other humanoid characters with gills are portrayed in film, art, etc., the gills are always placed on the neck. this makes no sense at all, since gills of that size would be much too small to collect sufficient oxygen for an organism of that size. it would make much more sense to put the gills on the chest or back. it'd look way cooler, too.

and that led to 1) a story idea, and 2) the realization that soon after medical science made it possible for humans to have gills, someone would want to get theirs pierced.

i also had some neat thoughts about bioluminescent implants and how they could be used for signaling purposes for gilled human divers, using color sequences to communicate, or at least to signal mission status. but of course, if we'd got to the point where we could have gills, we'd probably be able to have implanted transmitters that worked with subvocalizations, so really the lightshow would just be for coolness value.

and then there's the skin thing. you couldn't have the gills covered in the water, so you couldn't wear a traditional wetsuit. you could of course have one with a cutout, but that would rather reduce the efficacy of the insulative properties. so you'd need to come up with some way for people to stay warm, too. and to protect their skin. scales probably wouldn't appeal to most people, since they'd be scratchy and unpleasant to snuggle up with. you could apply an insulating slime layer before going in the water, but it'd get scraped off too easily and wouldn't protect against abrasive surfaces. so i'm still thinking on that one.

by request

the night i lived up to my rep