Before my Saddam-capture wakeup call this morning, I knew I was already in for a treat: waking up in the middle of the night, I looked out the window to see a gauzy, white haze. Snow! Thanksgiving's present was followed by another storm; both melted from a temperature ridge about a week later, but over the past three days Northern Ohioans have watched flakes drop in short sputters of flurries. Last night, of course, a considerable shower moved past, leaving my locality with about four inches. That vanguard has been followed by several waves, the last of which is passing through - its snow drifting by my window - as I type.

The view? It's beautiful. I can now clearly see undulations of the valley to my southeast; though the wind faces of deciduous trees, mostly maple, are caked with white, evergreens are memorably recognizable by their heavily laden boughs. The sky, overcast and low-hanging, is only two or three shades darker than the snow - perfect, as when it's snowing I prefer clouds to sun.

I took a few pictures. With a little luck of the lens, they'll be windows into the moments and impressions of today - freshly fallen snow, its serenity, the undeniable feeling of a wintry Christmas.

So spake a Toro commercial's voiceover on the radio today.

I love it. Who would choose to drive to lunch and go through the tasks of wiping off the car, defogging and heating it before driving on slushy roads through steady snow showers - keeping five miles per hour below the speed limit except when behind plow trucks, in which case ten miles per hour? I would. My only regret is that I lack a carry-around digital camera.

Tomorrow morning I'll be going tree-hunting with the family down south, in what will probably be the most seasonable weather since Christmas 1982. And yes, you're damn straight that I remember.

I'm a sucker for White Thanksgivings - but then, any day with snow after Halloween is fine with me, a dedicated subscriber to the Calvin & Hobbes motto of No green for at least five months out of the year. Cleveland's record for snowy Thanksgivings is poor, which made last year's winter extravaganza ever more dazzling. So you'll understand how yesterday's weather here, cold but not cold enough to freeze the incessant drizzle, wasn't exactly a prizewinner. I suppose I can't complain, though; it was seasonal.

But as I prepared to leave my folks' house about half an hour ago - my sis had flown in from Maryland and the family spent the day together, culminating in a brief-but-wacky game of Monopoly - I heard my name being called from the front of the house. "Mike! Mike! Come look!"

I glanced out the kitchen window into the backyard - that yard didn't look as dark as it should've. Snow!

I raced to the front door, my parents bookends. Blades of grass still poked through the inch and a half or so that had fallen already, but the airborne, white cascades and the wind bearing them showed some vigor. This wasn't a storm - but damn near close enough. I turned to look at my PT on the driveway, blanched as Herbie. Grinning madly, I slapped on my sweater, coat, hat and gloves; walked out to the car and gave the motor a head start while I brushed snow from the windows. I set arrangements for breakfast in the morning before bidding my folks a good night. Then I scuttled out of the neighborhood's snow-slicked roads with a requisite fishtail - just one or two every year - to settle back into the winter-driver's groove.

I'll admit: I took as many backroads as I could, then made a left onto one of our main streets. By then the snow had turned to a staggered rhythm of brisk squalls; Black Friday traffic, of course, pretty high even for nine o'clock at night. Barely out of the driveway, my wipers were still a bit frozen, so the windshield would actually blur on every backstroke. Once that shook out, I had to crank up the defogger to better gauge oncoming traffic for that high-stakes left turn. And then the game of picking out lanes from beneath a half-inch of frozen, white slush while keeping respectable pace traffic.

The view from my apartment is stirring - snow is snow and I love it all, but there's always a touch to that first one of the season. I just looked out the balcony window again and it's still coming down generously. The grass is gone. The weatherman's put out an advisory. Two to four inches by the morning. Really, from the cold to the driving to the sight, I love it all. Don't call me crazy - call me born for the climate.

Ethnicity described through facial features has always fascinated me - just a little more scientific inclination and I could have been a physical anthropologist. As are many passions, mine was encouraged by curiousity about my own heritage. Sure, on paper, I'm one half Northern Italian and the other Sicilian, second-and-one-half generation; but with such rich, heterogeneous roots between both families I've been unwilling to limit my understanding to the general regions in question.

And, more importantly, I've never exactly considered myself a picture-perfect Italian - and certainly not what you'd expect from a Sicilian. Most people wouldn't care but for me, it's a sort of paradox: I'm drawn to physical ethnicity and my own happens to be a bit of a mystery, therefore I'm drawn to study it even more. The platinum-blond shock of hair I had as a kid has long since darkened to brown, but my skin is hardly a shade apart from that of most Northern Europeans and my eyes are blue. An acquaintance once commented that I do have a "statuesque" face like a Roman bust - in other words angular, complete with cleft chin, high cheekbones and a square jaw - but my nose is only faintly Mediterranean. It's not the honker you'd expect on a guy with a vowel on the end of his last name; really, I've seen more beak on Black Irish and Welsh. And though my scalp and beard are thick, my beard is patchy - and when was the last time you heard of an appeciably full-blooded Italian who couldn't grow a beard?

Though recessive genes from my mother were required, I obviously inherited the lightness from my father. The Ubaldis are from Perugia - and possibly descended from some serious canonical nobility - while my grandmother's side can trace ancestors to the Piedmont region near Switzerland. Folks got in, as they say, over the fence. That may have been the case with the Ubaldis, as well: you can see that my grandfather's father was well over six foot with girth to match, not exactly a typical pizan. There's another picture of him - damnably, I haven't seen it in years - that's more instructive, as he remarkably resembled the German brute tangling with Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. How does that translate to looks? I hate a stereotype, but let me put it this way: if my father and I walked down the street on a Saturday wearing yarmulkas, nobody'd think twice. Dad grew up in Queens; when he studied at Syracuse University in the late 1960s, between his accent and looks, more than one person thought he was Jewish. Then again, my mother insists that in one photograph taken for his collegiate fencing team he looks Chinese. Take your pick.

My mother's family is from Sicily. Agrigento. Not too dark, but only people with their glasses off might not make the Mediterranean connection. Easy enough, right? Wrong. The place has spent the last 2,500 years as civilization's hard-knocks LEGO set. Build it up, break it down, pass ownership to the guy who just gave you a black eye. Watch him build. Sucker-punch him, take it back. Build again. And so forth:

The site upon which Agrigento was constructed has been inhabited since prehistoric times, but it was not until about 580 BC that a group of people from Gela, originally from Rhodes and Crete, decided to found Akragas, taking its name from one of the two rivers which confine the city...The city reached its height under the tyrant Theron (488-472 BC).

...The philosopher Empedocles (c492-c432 BC) advocated a moderate form of democracy which lasted for some time. In 406 BC, Akragas suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Carthaginians, who destroyed it. It was rebuilt in the second half of the 4C BC by Timoleon, a mercenary general from Corinth engaged in the fight against the Carthaginians in Sicily. It was at this time that the Greco-Roman quarter was built.

...In 210 BC, Akragas was besieged by the Romans. They conquered the city and changed its name to Agrigentum.

Vicissitudes of Girgenti – With the fall of the Roman Empire, the city passed first to the Byzantines, then into Arab hands (9C). They built a new town centre higher up (at the heart of the modern town), calling it Girgenti – this lasted until 1927, when its Latin name was restored – which became the capital of the Berber kingdom. In 1087, the town was conquered by the Normans, prompting a new phase of prosperity and power which also enabled it to repel the frequent attacks of the Saracens.

Assuming that each party involved managed to leave a few representatives throughout the series of violent transfers of power, I've got Greek, Carthagian, Roman, Berber and Gallic blood in me. Probably not enough French for a propensity to appease dictators, either. Not bad.

But theories are much of what make up my knowledge of ancestry. Modern recordkeeping is just that: modern. My father's father went back to Italy in 1948 and could only trace our lineage about 150 years; before that, the Church kept records and my grandfather couldn't read Latin. Nobody has made inquiries on my mother's side. I actually happened to take two classes under the above-linked professor, Kenneth Pennington, when he taught at Syracuse. His answer to the origins of the Ubaldis? "Speculative fancy," before you go very far. And it doesn't help one's burning curiousity to know that a Parisian friend of my sister's - whom she met several years ago when the girl was on co-op in Cleveland - has the surname "Obaldia."

Sometimes I feel a pang of jealousy for someone able to say that they're "Irish. Dublin. Lived there all the way back to when we beat each other with tree trunks." There's a comfort to that kind of certainty. But it wouldn't be nearly as interesting if it weren't this way, would it?

Two round trips to Albany are on the record books. For lack of chronology, I'll present in bullet form:

I will be out of town for the next four days on the second annual Albany Excursion, where I will assume the title of Straßekommandant and drive myself, my friend Paul and our respective luggage and photography gear to the home of our mutual high school buddy, Ed. Last year's trip was a blast. The weekend was wall-to-wall wintery Central New York, lots and lots of Playstation gaming, an animé feature or two, shooting the breeze, Albany public attractions and restaurants crawling with good-looking college girls.

This year we tried to assemble a summer plan but a third-party meetingplace with Paul and Ed's mutual college friend in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania fell through several times until the end of August, at which point I decided that we'd try a repeat performance for the fall - only a little bit earlier, so we could catch the fiery end to deciduous leaves' reign. As we went at the very beginning of November last year, it's obvious how great a difference two weeks make; looking out the window now I see more trees that are still largely green or light yellow than reddish-orange or bare. New York State's winter always a week or two in advance of Ohio's, we may have managed to put ourselves on the road just at the height of the colors. Paul's a professional photographer, Ed and I are semi-active amateurs - so we're duly equipped and more than eager to catch the sights. The drive to Albany is two-thirds the same road I used to drive with my father to Syracuse University - the New York Thruway on Interstate 90. It's straight, easy, unerring and God-awful boring. Forests, however, line the highway on the west side of the state and become mountainous and even more picturesque as one nears New England. Paul and I will be leaving a bit early tomorrow morning to account for any time we spend hopping out of the car and taking a snapshot or two - a fun pastime we finally began last weekend in rural country half and hour west of Cleveland. Which brings me to my next item.

Every now and then I mumble about a photo weblog - sit back down, it's not ready. I haven't even started a Movable Type frame. But last weekend's shoot only added to the number of interesting photographs I've accumulated over the last few months. A few of you have expressed quite an interest in seeing my footage, so in the spirit of a possibly film-heavy weekend and as a nod to the photoblog-to-be, I have five thunderstorm photographs I shot from my southern-facing balcony in late June (as a good read will show, I am fascinated by clouds and meteorology in general):

Over the past weeks I've been taking faux-panoramic shots of my balcony's view of the valley as the trees turn. As snow falls this winter I'll capture the ice-glistening trees and hefty drifts - always a favorite. When spring arrives I may do well to walk about and catch close-ups of tulips and other early bloomers. Then back to the thunderstorms come May and June.

I'll tell you all about the trip when I return - and, even though Ed's a Mac sort of guy, I'm more than likely to pop on early in the morning while the other guys are sleeping off their beers to opine in an HTML-kind-of-way.

The Straßekommandant is off to a dinner invite, then to purchase a long-overdue fall-winter coat; then packing. I stand, somewhat pictorially analogous to Washington crossing the Delaware, minus the boat and period costume, pointing (even though he, you know, isn't in the painting); determined. To Albany!

Leave it to peaceful disruptions to bring about a welcome change of pace. When the electricity went dead on Thursday afternoon I made straight for my parents’ house, spent three hours with them and then left to reconcile my own home. I pulled into my apartment building’s parking lot to find it buzzing with tenants who would have nothing of dark, stifling hot rooms. It was the group of two girls and a fellow chatting on a tarp next to someone’s car that started me thinking about getting out and enjoying the sunny evening. Scaling the stairs under emergency lights, I ducked in my apartment to drop off my dress jacket and workbag before resisting a few electric habits. No phone messages, gone if there were any. Everything in the fridge was slowly warming, I knew that; no need to make sure. The television was dead. I actually caught myself turning towards the computer room to hit the internet and check headlines.

I needed to get out.

Bounding back down the stairs, I made my way around the building.. A walk was what I needed - but not a normal walk. Since May I’ve been making off-and-on jaunts inside a tiny subdivision consisting of an oval and an outlet; the houses are vintage 1950s and impeccably maintained. It’s long enough for exercise, short enough for a twilight stroll. But like I said, I didn’t want the usual. A three-way intersection sits to the east of my apartment, beyond it a forested valley. The north-south main road is busy and generally boring; the eastbound break-off is a road I know well by name but not experience, having lived on the other side of town all my life (no need for a shortcut that’s out of my way). It’s old, long and functionally rural - perfect. It was only seven-thirty so I had light to count on. I crossed the main road and began my walk along the north shoulder of the eastbound; grass where it wasn’t gravel.

Houses were rustic; most of them unique, having been built by their first owners. Lots to the north were short in front but made for gigantic backyards extending a couple hundred feet to sidle up against the interstate. It was the kind of big yard you remember from childhood, return to as an adult and confirm that yes, it really was that enormous.

I walked for fifteen minutes when I found, smack dab among this repetition, a giant, empty lot. There it was: a patch of trees and foliage wedged like a sylvan keystone between miles of developed land, the street to the south and the interstate to the north. No rhyme or reason as to why the city, now nearing a satisfying build-out, had missed this green tuft for decades. Curse? Lazy tenants whose house had been swallowed up by woods? Good tenants who happened to be the Three Bears? Preservation, perhaps: one of the few pockets of certified boondock the state of Ohio managed to squirrel away before the despoiling wrath of Big 20th Century Industrial and Urban Development knocked down trees and gave everyone paved roads, heat and running water. I couldn’t tell, only to see for certain that it was a dense forest. I’ll make an inquiry with the zoning board.

Further down was another oddity: two stunted, half-streets jutting from the main road. They both ran the length of lots to either side of me - but a few hundred feet doesn’t provide for many houses. You could find more people on a metro bus than either street’s block party. Stranger still, though they met at the same intersection the two streets’ construction intent couldn’t have been more different. The north street had no more than ten older, smaller, cheaper, haphazard houses before its unsightly dead end; the south street inclined and curved as it crept up a rise in front of the valley, lined with healthily six-figured homes. Two inquiries with the zoning board.

After several more minutes of walking the treelines closed in from either side while the road hugged a hill, dipping and rising and dipping again. Then it split off to a southbound road that dropped into the valley, a wing of the Cleveland Metroparks, and the local water treatment plant - the latter invisible from where I stood, so my nose succeeded where my eyes couldn’t. As the fumes became faint the road rose again, and trees cleared. The sight was nothing special - broad front yards, electrical lines slung on poles tracking a winding road, cars passing every few minutes or so, the darkening eastern horizon as it neared sunset on an August evening - but it flipped a switch in my mind.

Now, most of us are occasionally socked with memories when returning to a familiar place, and déjà vu when we can’t pin down what we’re supposed to remember. I’d only begun to drive down this road each day from the apartment and before that night, I had never walked it - I knew I had no memories of this place. Instead, the moment was Grand Central Station for a crossing barrage of hot summer evenings over the years. It took me back to Indiana, visiting the Nielsens seventeen years ago; Michigan, at the house my grandparents left recently; with my family at camps and resorts in southern Ohio; Pennsylvania, visiting old neighbors; in Kentucky with my OM team, while we waited on our van’s repair with a congratulatory six-pack for the auto mechanics; University of Tennessee, winning first place in all categories, walking back to the dormitory with our trophy and humming “Auld Lang Syne” over and over through a kazoo while OX smoked a cigar. Take a stack of papers that have spent ages in the attic and fling them around the room; pick each one up and read it before neatly filing them all away. That’s what it was like, over in another instant. Back to earth.

I’d gone about two miles when the valley and forest receded; there, lots south of the road ran flat and deep. A ranch was on that side, with acreage in front and buildings behind, a fence stretching for about an sixth of a mile along the road. The place was obviously an attraction: atop a ten-foot tall motte sat a brightly painted oxcart, while further back a carriage rested in the middle of a corral (by day you can see horses as you speed past in a car). A large sign, bearing the design of official municipal business, sprang from the side of the road next to the ranch’s long driveway. “Parker Ranch,” it read in large letters, below that a paragraph I couldn’t make out from where I was.

On the north side of the street, where I stood, a wary Malamute chained to a house next door had begun yapping at me. Between a certain disaffection with being barked at and a pang of curiosity for the story of Parker Ranch, I gave it a “What the hell,” crossed the street and stepped up to the sign.

PARKER RANCH. ADELE VON OHL PARKER. She was a daring stunt rider for Buffalo Bill before the Great Depression tossed her out of a job, the sign explained. Eventually settling outside of Cleveland to found the ranch to my right, Adele taught riding lessons to local youths and saw many a famous face stop by her equally well-known establishment. Gene Autrey was one; another was a circus owner who let his elephants “bathe in the Rocky River.” In 1969, the legend who was Adele von Ohl Parker passed on. Her legacy, concluded the sign, lives from by the preservative grace of Ohio's historical presentation society: horses, carriages and all.

Ms. Parker will always be ridin’ with us - giddyap!

That spot right in front of the Parker Ranch worked as the perfect waypoint for my stroll. Figuring the amount of time I’d taken to walk down, I had enough light left to return to the intersection in front of the apartment, turn, and finish the evening with a lap around the subdivision. So I went back the way I came, taking to the south side of the street once it provided enough shoulder on which to walk. I passed the hills, the half-street offshoots; the big lots and the empty lots.

Halfway back, I saw a boy of about twelve riding his bike towards me, furiously negotiating the edge of the pavement. Gravel, as we all discover in childhood, is the bane of bicycle tires, elbows and knees - and from the grimace on his face the risk of wiping out was, to him, halfway between a game and an obsession. I seldom have anything useful to say to kids, let alone when I’m about to break their concentration, so I kept eyes forward and let the daredevil’s show go on.

He zoomed past, revealing a middle-aged woman across the street and four or five houses down, shaking a tablecloth at the end of her driveway. I’d walked by the house on first leg of the stroll; was it the one with a family barbequing out back? It might have been; a couple of children, fresh from dinner, buzzed about near her.

She was largish and dark haired, and looked like a dozen women I’ve known over the years; friend’s mothers and my mother’s friends. The classic “somebody’s mom.” Continuing to shake the tablecloth, she turned slowly with me, watching out of the corner of her eye. Even from sixty feet away, her body language was obvious as I approached: she was about to say something.

Five, four, three, two -

“Did they make you walk home from work?” she smiled.

Big grin. I hadn’t expected that.

But I should have. The slacks, the leather shoes, dress shirt and tie; sweating from the heat and traipsing my way through gravel on the side of the road. I looked like I’d stepped out of the Disney made-for-television production of Death of a Salesman, where, you know, Willy Loman’s rear left wheel snags, mid-tragedy, on some raveled asphalt. He doesn’t drive off the cliff but instead leaves his suitcase and vanity in the car; trudges home; kisses his wife; releases Biff and Happy from their life sentences as painfully symbolic, one-dimensional supporting characters; cleans up; then goes ahead and gets ordained a few years later. At least I think it ends like that.

“Nah. I’m doing this out of my own free will. These kinds of days let us enjoy things we never would otherwise, you know,” I called back. I’ve got to be in a certain mood to follow one-liners and set up for the cymbal crash. Caught off-guard, I opt for lighthearted philosophy - but it usually works just as well.

She smiled again and turned back to finish with the tablecloth. I passed the house, beaming.

Walking the final several hundred paces on the country road proved to be a startling education in what a difference forty-odd feet make to the perception of a landscape. The south side of the road turned out to be a country diorama. Not a minute after passing the woman, I looked down to the left of the sidewalk to see deep, wide, weeks-old tractor tracks in dried mud and torn grass; points scored, I hadn’t seen anything like that in a while.

Next came a funny little brick house, its architecture somewhere between 1957 and 1958 Guy Williams Zorro. Plastic adobe façades, tall windows with display vases; all stuck on a ranch that couldn’t have been larger than the combined family room and kitchen of your standard mid-1960s colonial. The log-fence-enclosed sideyard - a “sideyard” because, of course, the ground behind the house abruptly fell away into the valley - stopped me in my tracks and I stood there for a minute, gaping in awe. A tiny shed stood at the house’s side; to the right of that was a brick-inlaid fountain with a circular, limestone base; a concrete-and-brick love bench behind the fountain; at the far corner of the lot, a jaw-dropping, brick gazebo just large enough to enclose an avid gardener as he tended to whatever ivy-like plants hung from the latticework. All of these things were connected by a narrow, winding, cut stone path.

I managed to squeak out a “Wow,” and moved off.

Roadkill some fifty feet beyond. Old, sunburnt, only slightly identifiable. It didn’t even stink, it was so dead. Nature’s welcome mat. A country staple.

Finally arriving at the intersection, I went for a lap around the Atomic Family subdivision. As I expected, it was unremarkable. Relaxing, yes; a good end to the walk, without a doubt. But I wouldn’t have invested two hours whipping around and around and around the oval - nor would I put pen to paper about it. In fact, that’s exactly what I did the moment I stepped from the bright hallway into pitch black. Water was out and I quickly drained my warmed pitcher; the apartment had been set to Bake. With a flashlight, I ambled out onto the balcony and scribbled down notes in a legal pad. Still reeling from the temperature inside, I dripped sweat to dot the page, resulting in some very interesting margin formations.

Adversity, my father jokes, prepares you for the important things in life: more adversity. What a perfect evening. Here’s to inconveniences like that one!

Fantasia on a Theme By Thomas Tallis by Ralph Vaughan Williams is by far the easiest way to draw tears from me.

I dropped by the folks' house after work this evening; it's my father's 54th birthday and the second anniversary of my grandfather's passing. The first we celebrated loudly, the second observed in our hearts. My old man and I started a word-gag joke about a broommaker and kept it going, volley after volley after volley. I love my parents.

My Animals compilation thumped bluesily through the car stereo to and from. On the way back, my foot was heavy and the night air was thin; so off I went, showering blurred houses with loud music from a hurtling, woodsided buggy. If I had a pompadour, Brylcreem, a comb, a switchblade, shirtsleeve smokes, a can of Tobias Wolff's Gorilla Blood and a bad attitude - well, then, I'd have been something.

Though I was considering an immersion into my "freedom and culture" essay, between Thursday, yesterday and today this has definitely turned out to be an educational audio-visual weekend. It's relaxing, it's low-budget and it's something I'd never really done before I set out on my own.

Thursday night I rented and watched The City of Lost Children, a suitably foreign film with incredible artistic vision and a passably semilinear plot. For those of you who know the movie, my favorites were the incessant tritone emission of the Cyclops' eyepieces and - no surprise, here - the beautifully aged Octopus sisters. No official site exists, though you can get a glimpse of both the film and nostalgia-laced early HTML on a fan page. As with many other foreign films, the film at first blush began to exhibit diffusion towards the end, as if Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the creation staff grew bored with stringing together events to form a narration. As in, Hey, we've been exploring a fantastic Neverland for seventy minutes. Why don't we complete the story arc of every single supporting character and antagonist with violent, ironic death. Let's do it in less than fifteen minutes. After all: we're French!

The French. Worthless in practical matters, they nevertheless win my vote for obscure, watch-every-five-to-ten-years art cinema and film noir. My salute, the ten-minute still-frame La Jetté:

...Mais un homme du futur...

Perfect.

It just so happens that when I rented the movie from Hollywood Video, the clerks quietly informed me that Blockbuster is actually the better store for miniseries and television collections. Good advice, it turns out: last night I found the store to run rings around poor old Hollywood. No Star Trek: The Next Generation series packages for rent, but I was immediately shown to Tom Hanks' post-Apollo 13 HBO extravaganza, From the Earth to the Moon. After a second trip to Blockbuster to have the theft-protection devices removed from the DVD case (I knew the transaction went to quickly!), I was ready to watch, root beer and potato chips in hand.

I've gone nearly halfway through. Apollo 9 and 10 succeeded at the finale of Part Five of Twelve; Neil and Buzz and the third guy whose name the nominally familiar can't remember are up next. After being inundated with the pathos, heartwarming and enormous budget of Band of Brothers, this series required a slight adjustment. Each episode, as it were, is composed of numerous subchapters, too - unlike Brothers - so the looseness threw me a bit. Multiple directorship varies much more dynamically in To the Moon, to the point where I nearly gave myself a headache rolling my eyes at Part 4. I'm not sure who it was, but he obviously missed the 1990s where EVERY LAST PIECE OF STOCK FOOTAGE DETAILING THE MISGUIDED ANGER OF 1960S RADICALS WAS JUXTAPOSED WITH THE DEATHS OF RFK AND MLK, ALL TO ACID-ROCK OVERDUB. The irony, at one time, was supposed to evoke old memories, long-suppressed by synthpop and Ronald Reagan's stellar windup for USSR-TKO. Clinton's in office! He almost admitted to doing drugs and protesting - and he commands the baby-killers, now, man! Kids are wearing retro! Boy, were we right all along. The 1990s, like any other incendiary, burned themselves out before being suddenly and finally destroyed by reality as it descended in the form of hijacked jetliners murdering thousands.

But I digress. The point in the episode was to focus squarely on one line, a telegram from an American to NASA. "You saved 1968," she said. Now, that is poignant: I don't know if I needed the art-video inlays of five different screens of protest and Vietnamese sorrow intermingled and substituted at alarming frame rates to really get it, unfortunately.

All in all, very interesting. I'll press forward later on this evening. Interestingly enough, the actor who played Gus Grissom - rather well, as a matter of fact - played Drake in Aliens. Poor guy had less than twenty minutes of screen time in the 1986 sci-fi flick and he's forever typecasted. I kept expecting him to grunt and flirt with Vasquez. Best of all: When Grissom's NASA presence was related in story posthumously to a Senate inquiry, we all found one more reason, fictionally derived or not, to hold utter contempt for Walter Mondale.

Before I sat down to translate my intriguing little life (operative word in that one is yours to choose) into a weblog entry, I swung by the library for some music. I had 1980s synthpop in my head, probably as an antidote to all the bad 1960s revolution garbage (see above). Couldn't find any. So I went wild, relatively speaking, and picked up music that I wouldn't normally listen to: Brian Eno; Genesis; traditional Chinese music; an old favorite absent in my CD collection, Ralph Vaughan Williams; Robert Schumann.

The kicker was a CD I picked up in the ethnic section, The North Coast Pipe Band Pipes Up! You guessed it: wall-to-wall bagpipes. Naturally, it went right into the disc player for the ride back; immediately, "Scotland the Brave" was blaring out of my PT as only bagpipe companies can. I was considering entering myself into the Guiness Book of World Records as "First Man in Northeast Ohio to Ever Blast Bagpipe Music out of His Operational Motor Vehicle Whilst Absent any Ironic Intent."

I've got to tell you: cranking bagpipe music is a funny thing. Nobody in the immediate vicinity knows how to react. Guys my age in duly attractive cars are supposed to play rock music and other suave endeavors - not bagpipes. That's the first problem; the second is what we can safely call "bagpipe prejudice." People walking down the street crane their necks, twisting this way and that, trying to figure out where the hell the parade is coming from. Then they follow the sound to the street, see me, wonder why a guy my age isn't taking advantage of his duly attractive car by playing rock music et al, and stare. Oh, the stares.

It's all right. I know I'm hip. All the same - should the coolness of bagpipes be considered a Consitutional right? Let's sue all the way to the Supreme Court.

Maybe...not. We can rely on social mores and respect for tradition to keep it current and respected.

I just finished the first Vaughan Williams and have the Chinese music in. Soon after, I'm off to choose my own adventure: guitar, computer, book, Apollo 11. Gung Bay Fat Chow!