William Gibson comments on the many and varied uses of those wooden coffee stirrers at Starbucks. This reminds me of two things:

Firstly, I stole massive quantities of those stirrers to make little walls and floors and furniture for this scale model stage I had to build in a stage design class my freshman year. The one set I remember in particular was for that David Mamet play, American Buffalo (which was also a pretty good movie). They were easier to obtain (the stirrers were) and easier to cut than popsicle sticks and just about as sturdy, and I don’t regret for an instant that dozens of Starbucks patrons must have had to use straws or spoons or something to stir their coffee that week. Since I stole all the stirrers. I learned where to get blueprints made in Union Square for that class, too. It was a good class.

Secondly, and this isn’t so much in a coffee-stirrer vein as a making-use-of-disposable-things vein, but I remember years ago flipping through this particular book at someone else’s house - it was a collection of uses for tampon applicators, the little tiny cardboard or plastic tubes that otherwise just get thrown out and apparently produce massive quantities of waste. And my favorite idea for using discarded tampon applicators was to make a foosball table with them - the applicators would be all the little foos-men, rows and rows of them. I wish I had a tampon applicator foosball table.

Remember when Chris and I went to see 28 Days Later last week? He wrote up some notes on the film and the people we saw it with, and they’re right here.

1. Saturday Night Fever is another one of the seemingly endless list of movies everyone else is always amazed I’ve never seen. Probably the only thing funnier than Travolta’s dancing is the fact that his clothes are now back in style.

2. Monster Garage and/or Monster House. Last night it was the latter, and even though I’m not usually a fan of reality television I have to say the electrician guy working on the Western-themed house was good times - it turns out that lying about your experience and qualifications on your show application may actually get you on the air, but it won’t keep you from looking like a jackass once you get there.

3. Young Guns (which I mentioned yesterday) left me in the mood to watch The Lost Boys today, making for a very eighties-Kiefer sort of weekend. Which isn’t a bad thing at all, really. Maybe next weekend I should rent the first season of 24 for a more recent Kiefer adventure.

4. Pokémon and assorted other animated adventures, because it’s not possible to outgrow watching Saturday morning cartoons (although these days I am more about the iced coffee and bagel than I am about the Count Chocula).

I’m fighting off the plague again - or at least a really irritating sore throat, which is almost like the Black Death. Really. In any case, it means more games and more movies this weekend - today I checked out Young Guns on cable. Nothing like a just barely post-Lost Boys Kiefer Sutherland in a western flick with a new wave soundtrack. Plus a happy ending, despite some characters dying rather bloodily at the end - thank goodness they were the ones we didn’t really like anyway.

As if Magic wasn’t bad enough, I picked up a couple of Pokemon theme decks yesterday and Chris and I just played a couple of rounds. It’s actually kind of fun, although the games are a lot shorter than what I’m used to in Magic. I doubt I’ll build an actual collection or anything, but the Ruby and Sapphire decks I got are good times - I’ve got the Ruby game for the GBA as well, so I feel like I’m already familiar with most of the Pokemon involved. All of this is somehow CowboyNeal’s fault.

I saw another blue-screened MetroCard vending machine on my way to work this morning (in the Lafayette entrance to the N/R at Canal Street). Why does this happen when I’m not carrying my camera? I’ve spotted incapacitated machines at the Ocean Parkway and Union Square stations as well, although not recently. It’s always a pretty funny sight, of course, but it’s also one that adds to my general sense of discomfort over the MTA’s plan to remove a bunch of ticket booth humans in order to save money, which would leave people to rely on the machines instead. Blue screens may be fairly uncommon, but other woes are not - I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suppose that somewhere around a third of the machines I pass by in the course of a commuting week are in some way disabled. Mostly they just won’t accept some kind of currency, usually bills, and sometimes they’re entirely out of order. It’s not uncommon to see a station in which all of the machines have something wrong with them, especially if it’s a small station with only one or two to begin with.

It makes me wonder what I’m supposed to do if it’s three in the morning at an unmanned station and I can’t get a fare from any of the machines. I don’t usually carry change around with me, so the frequency of the “No bills accepted at this time” message is a little worrisome. Yes, those machines will usually accept a credit or debit card - but my Chase banking card has never worked with a MetroCard machine (UNABLE TO READ YOUR CARD, PLEASE TRY AGAIN), and I don’t have any actual credit cards.

I know if I actually found myself in that situation, it wouldn’t be that big a deal to go find a 24-hour deli an ATM where I could get and break a 20 (and get two bucks in change, I guess), but it’s not exactly an ideal solution. I’ve already been irritated at having to pay more for increasingly shitty transit service, and I think it’s irresponsible of the MTA to assume that vending machines will solve all their money problems. If we’re going to be dependent on them in order to use the subway, they should at least be more reliable - and blue screened machines don’t encourage impressions of ability, to say the least.

Saw 28 Days Later last night and my impressions are mostly in line with the RT reviews at that link: some really wonderful scenes, nice visuals, definitely a Danny Boyle movie, and some unfortunate third-act choices (which I won’t discuss in case you haven’t seen it). Of course it walks the fine line between intense and cheesy at times - it’s a zombie movie, fer chrissakes. Not as much gore as I was expecting, but that’s neither here nor there. Chris pointed out this interesting bit from Boyle and two of the other filmmakers; it’s worth a read:

“Aside from providing structure, genre also allows you to play games with convention. To pick one convention example out of many, it tends to be the case that in any horror film worth its salt, there will be a version of a scene where, say, a girl will walk into a dark and obviously dangerous cellar, holding only a flashlight with dying batteries as defence. At this point, all members of the audience will be asking, internally or externally - why the hell are you doing that?”

So suddenly it’s well into July already, which I don’t quite understand. Last time I checked, exams were just barely over - but then time flies when you’re working a lot. I admit I’m looking forward to the fall, and not just because of the weather. It will be my last year at NYU, which is great and all, although I do sort of wish I could spend another year or two just doing the undergrad thing. Instead, I’ll take a little time to work and then head off to the big bad world of grad school. (Because if there’s one thing more useful than a philosophy degree, it’s another philosophy degree.) I may actually TA a philosophy course this coming semester, which would probably be fun - I liked the class when I took it myself, it’s just a matter of fitting it in with the rest of my class and work schedules, as well as finding time to write my senior thesis. And I thought I was busy now.

Although I haven’t yet seen 28 Days Later, I’ve certainly been hearing a lot about it. First came reviews from the Times and Salon. Then people started telling me I should check it out, that it’s my kind of thing - and it certainly does seem to be up my proverbial alley. Chris mentioned that the premise of the film sounded not unlike that of I Am Legend, so I borrowed his copy of the book and read it over the weekend (and I’d recommend it if you haven’t read it). Both Legend and the trailers for 28 Days reminded me, on the other hand, of The Plague, which I re-read last fall (and which I’d also recommend).

Anyway, my original point in bringing up the film was to point out another article on it in today’s Times, this one by cancer biologist and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus. His piece is called “Virus as Metaphor: Microbiology and ‘28 Days Later’” and even if you’re not all that inerested in the movie itself, the article’s probably worth a read.

When I was just a little tiny Emma, I used to spend my summers at Camp Betsey Cox in Vermont. Five consecutive years there means that whenever the weather gets hot now, I start remembering all that goofy-ass camp stuff - the inane songs, the cabins, the absolutely classic rivalry with our all-male neighbors (the hated Camp Sangamon). Betsey Cox is a good camp, as camps go, I think. There were swimming lessons and hiking trips and chores and riding and archery and mosquitos and a farm. It looks like they’ve even still got kittens - my own much-missed cat came from BC long ago. Of course, sharing a room with seven other girls and two counselors has its drawbacks - I lived with a girl one year who refused to shower even once weekly (the minimum demanded by the staff), while others insisted on performing truly private grooming tasks in the comfort of their bunks (rather than the washroom), and a few who didn’t shut up all summer about not having electricity in the cabins. But I think these things are to be expected when hundreds of pubescent girls are crammed into the mountains together. And their veggie burgers weren’t half bad.